Monday Microsofty 79: The Last Digits in Fermat’s Last Theorem
Did Andrew Wiles really prove Fermat’s Last Theorem? Today we offer you a chance to decideAbout last week’s MicroSofty: Think of the probability issue as just a distraction…
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Monday Microsofty 78: Card Sharks That Bite Harder
You can beat the odds in some card games if you understand probability theory. Try your chances!Last week’s puzzle, like several others, is easy to solve if we use inclusive thinking about relationships.
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Monday Micro Softy 29: A Funeral Lament in Four Lines
The funeral director was puzzled by Dan’s description of his relationship to the deceased but there was no question that his grief was sincereThe answer to Monday Micro Softy 28 shows that, where chance is concerned, even the advice given in books about beating the odds can be wrong.
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Monday Micro Softy 28: Beating the Odds of Winning Sweepstakes?
Does it make a difference when the sweepstakes hobbyist sends in her entries?The solution to Monday Micro Softy 27 lies in appreciating the significance of Keith’s request for two bags instead of one.
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The Linda Problem Revisited, As If Reality Matters
Part 2: AI enthusiasts use false claims for humans' “natural stupidity” to bolster claims for machine intelligenceThe people who flunked the Linda problem were not biased; they just assumed there was some POINT to telling them that Linda was active in social justice issues.
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Humans Aren’t That Biased — and Machines Aren’t That Smart
Part 1: At an upcoming conference on AI, I will be puncturing that particular AI enthusiast’s fantasyVia the “Linda Problem,” Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky convinced generations that we don’t grasp probability. They’re wrong.
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Monday Micro Softy 11: What Happened to That Other Dollar?
Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy get the discount for their cheap hotel rooms but the figures don’t really add upTo solve this Micro Softy, you need to pinpoint the flaw in the logic that hinges on the Law of Conservation of Money.
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The Monday Micro Softy 10: The Monte Hall Problem
In this case, it comes down to: How badly do you want a goat in your life?Probability problems typically come down to analyzing the choices carefully and picking the most promising one.
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Monday Micro Softy 7: Who’s the Champ?
A single number does not always determine which player is betterAnd here’s the answer to why young Clay’s arithmetic didn’t make sense at first to Claude — but then Claude realized that the boy was right.
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Monday Micro Softy 6: Bad Adding?
It looked to Claude like young Clay’s numbers didn’t add up but he seemed confident. What did he know that his father at first didn’t?And here’s the answer to the probability question: What are the chances that Claude and Chloe’s younger child is also a boy?
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Do Fantasy Sports Tell Us Something About Artificial Intelligence?
My biggest takeaway from my own involvement is how well fantasy football illuminates some weaknesses of artificial intelligence (AI)AI models are really good at finding patterns in data but they are bad at deciding whether these spotted patterns can be used to make reliable predictions.
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The World Series of Coin Flips
Here we go again with the annual coin-flipping ritual known as the World SeriesWith the Yankees and Dodgers so evenly matched, this World Series will be somewhat like a coin-flipping contest. That’s the paradox of luck and skill.
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P-Hacking: The Perils of Presidential Election Models
History professor Alan Lichtman’s model uses 13 true/false questions reflecting likely voter interests. But some of them seem rather subjectiveLichtman’s Thirteen Keys to the White House prediction model for the presidency shows some evidence of p-hacking, as does Helmut Norpoth’s Primary Model.
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Presidential Pundits—a P-Hacking Parable
In politics, as elsewhere, too many studies flop when other researchers attempt to replicate them with fresh dataSome prediction models were developed by well-intentioned researchers before the perils of p-hacking were clearly understood, hence the failures.
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What the Luck? How Luck Matters to Olympic and Major League Wins
One way to think about the relative importance of skill and luck is to consider the consistency of the outcomesStatistical analysis shows that in major sports, the players or teams that won most of their games benefitted to a surprising degree from good luck.
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The Two-Sided Lottery Card Paradox and Infinity
Assuming the infinite often leads to ridiculous conclusions.Here’s the takeaway. Infinity does not exist in reality. There are not an infinite number of parallel universes. It’s thought candy.
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A Physicist Tries to Avoid the Fact of Design in Our Universe…
Physicist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University argues, against apparent fine-tuning, that our universe’s cosmological constant should have a special value like zero, but doesn’tIn his discussion with Robert Lawrence Kuhn at Closer to Truth, Tufts physicist and cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin addresses the question, “Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Mind?”: If the deep laws of the universe had been ever so slightly different human beings wouldn’t, and couldn’t, exist. All explanations of this exquisite fine-tuning, obvious and not-so-obvious, have problems or complexities. Natural or supernatural, that is the question. Vilenkin — who is also a professor of evolutionary science — concedes the main point: Alexander Vilenkin: [0:40] Well yeah that’s right. It appears that the Universe is fine-tuned in the sense that there are about 30 constants of nature which take some specific value: if you look at these numbers, they look Read More ›
The Search for ET Should Quit Claiming Earth Is Not Special
How will we assess the raw probability of being alone in this universe when we have no other universe to compare with ours?Earth IS special. The Copernican Principle is false, due to massive evidence of fine-tuning. Of course, that does not show that Earth is unique.
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A Modest Proposal for the MLB
Major League Baseball got greedy and needs to reform.If the regular season is devalued and the playoffs are recognized as essentially meaningless, the MLB may actually lose money.
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The MLB Coin-Flipping Contest
What are the chances that wild-card teams will make it to the World Series and win?One anomaly this year is that Seattle didn’t qualify for the playoffs even though it had a better record than the Central Division winner, Minnesota.
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