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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: pgerassi who wrote (128050)11/10/2000 4:24:20 PM
From: jcholewa  Read Replies (2) of 1571088
 
> The actual probability of 500 tails in 2,000 tosses is
500!*1500!/2000! far more than 1 in 2^2000.
> 1 in 2^2000 is for the chance that the first 500 tosses are tails and the last 1500 tosses are heads,
> or simply any single sequence of 2000 results.

Hmmm. Lemme test that out with a smaller sample set. If F represents the number of flips and T represents the precise number of Tails, you're saying that the probability of getting T tails on F flips is T!(F-T)!/F!

Smaller Dataset: one tails on three flips.
T=1
F=3

The actual answer should be:
(THH + HTH + HHT) out of (TTT + TTH + THT + THH + HTT + HTH + HHT + HHH)
or three out of eight

According to your formula, the answer comes out to:
1!(3-1)!/3! = 2/(3*2) = 2/6 = 1/3

You seem to be correct in that I made a mistake, but I believe that you may have made a mistake, too.

However, I suspect your answer was much closer than mine. :)

Hmmm ... I suspect that the denominator is indeed 2^2000. I just ignored the numerator, which is -- uh -- the number of combinations that you can have of T tails in F flips.

Can we possibly revise this formula so that it's easier for me to comprehend?

    -JC

PS: What about F!/[(T!(F-T)!)*2^T] ?
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