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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:37PM
from the corrupt-random-number-algorithm dept.
from the corrupt-random-number-algorithm dept.
Aleksandar Vulovic, czar of the Serbian state lottery, has resigned from his position after winning numbers were mysteriously broadcast on television before they had been drawn.
Allegations of fraud abound on every hand following the incident, reports the Associated Press.
In what was presented to the public as a live broadcast on Tuesday evening, one of the numbers in the winning combination was revealed before the number appeared to be drawn.
"That sparked accusations that the numbers had been chosen in advance," according to AP.
Vulovic has denied there was any dodginess and explained that the incident was due to a "technical mistake".
He added that he was stepping down from his position, not out of guilt, but out of "moral obligation".
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Lottery Chief Resigns as Winning Combo Numbers Appear on Screen BEFORE Being Drawn
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Hey, wait a minute!! I want a divorce!! ... you're not Clint Eastwood!!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday August 06 2015, @01:24AM
No, you're confusing probability with expected outcome.
1 is the absolute highest probability possible - it means this absolutely will happen, you can't get any more likely than that. What would it even mean to say that there's a 2000% chance that something would happen? It may be very, very likely to occur more than once in a given sample size, but that probability will still be no greater than 100%.
There's other math you can do to figure out how many times an event is likely to occur in a given sample size, the likely standard deviation of that number, etc. But those are not probabilities, that's using probability to determine expected outcomes - a thing which is back in the realm of countable numbers rather than probabilities, and thus very well may be greater than one.
Consider flipping a coin with a 50% chance of landing heads up. Flip it ten times and you can expect it to come up heads roughly 0.50*10 = 5 times. That's the expected outcome. But there is a small chance that you'll get all tails ( (1-0.50)^10 = 0.098% ) And thus the odds of getting at least one head head must be will be less than 1 by that amount (only 99.9%). Flip it a billion, billion times and there's *still* a chance that you'll get all tails - infinitesimally small, but not quite zero, and thus the odds of getting at least one head is *still* ever so slightly less than one.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:26AM
What are you, some sort of maths troll?
Firstly, the poster you originally replied to made no suggestion that the probability of this happening was greater than one, merely that they saw "no reason why that should be considered vanishingly small." Your own maths bear that out, you set the probability using your example figures at 0.999999998.
Secondly, the poster described this as the "chance" this would happen, not the probability.
Thirdly, you've mis-constructed your probability formula from the original poster's words. There are two sentences there - see if you can tell which one is the "probability formula" you're speaking of and which is the extension where it's turned into the expected outcomes you seem to know the difference between so well, yet completely failed to differentiate between earlier.