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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (127916)	11/10/2000 12:31:25 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570880

Scumbria, I'm using a very brute force algorithm I just used a spreadsheet. I converted the number to binary, 1 digit per cell. Then I added the digits. 12 digits 4096 went fine. When I tried to extend it to 16 (Excel's limit of 64K rows) I ran out of memory and lost my spreadsheet. but I'm sure there is a simple equation. I am sure there is. And I am pretty sure a few years ago I might have known it <g> But I think a problem for n coin tosses with 1/4 or less having say tails divided by n should have a numerical result, or at least the limit as n -> infinity should converge to something. Well, maybe to 0. <g> Joe

To: Scumbria who wrote (127916)	11/10/2000 2:02:13 AM
From: ptanner	Respond to of 1570880

Scumbria & Joe, Re: 2000 coin tosses... Now I have something to distract me from wandering the web for election news! I also tried a spreadsheet with formulas recalled dimly from my probability course and unfortunately the computer didn't like numbers greater than 10E+300 or something. Maybe I need a 64-bit system? I like the brute force software approximation but this might show more of the limits of the random number algorithm. Unless you have one of those thermally based generators - wasn't there one on an Intel processor? Unfortunately, I don't have a programming environment at the moment and am smart enough not to try to find one at 11 PM. But, I do still have my probability book so will go look up the formulas in greater detail. I was able to get some information for 100 coins and assuming my formulas were correct the odds were pretty slim at this level. -PT ps: I think I have 2000 pennies downstairs... and they might be easier to find than the textbook!

To: Scumbria who wrote (127916)	11/10/2000 5:23:53 AM
From: ptanner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570880

Scumbria, For 28 coin tosses I get the odds at 1 in 159 (1,683,218/268,435,456). You should be able to run through all possible results in less than a couple hours with only 268 million possibilities directly rather than using random numbers. The largest I can compute is for n=1,256 for which the answer odds are 2.13E+305/2^1256. For n=2000 I believe we could agree the answer is "zero" since as an engineer, I believe that pi is sometimes equal to three. -PT