^TagProbability

^{Type
post

Author
Gary Smith
Date
October 27, 2023

Categorized
Probability

Tagged
Baseball, coin tossing, Gary Smith, Probability, wild card, World Series}

The MLB Coin-Flipping Contest

_{What are the chances that wild-card teams will make it to the World Series and win?} _{Gary Smith

October 27, 2023

12

Probability}

“Let me tell you sonny, how it used to be in the good old days.” Is there anything worse than what Bruce Springsteen called “boring stories of glory days”? He goes on, “I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it but I probably will.” Well, this year’s World Series brought back memories of the glory days when there were two Major League Baseball leagues — the American League and the National League — and the regular season winners of each league met in the World Series. Now, each league has three divisions (East, Central, and West) and a complicated sequence of playoff games that involves the three division winners and three wild card teams in Read More ›

Scoring the winning points at a basketball game

^{Type
post

Author
Gary Smith
Date
July 28, 2023

Categorized
Probability

Tagged
Basketball, Bowling, data, Gary Smith, Hot Hand, Kevin Love, NBA, prediction, Probability, Psychology, Statistics, Stephen Curry, Streak}

Sabrina Ionescu’s Hot Hand

_{When basketball players hit a "streak," does that elevate the probability of success?} _{Gary Smith

July 28, 2023

12

Probability}

Most people believe that athletes sometimes get “hot” or “cold” with their performance elevated or depressed temporarily. For example, Purvis Short, who scored 59 points in an NBA game, said, “You’re in a world all your own. It’s hard to describe. But the basket seems to be so wide. No matter what you do, you know the ball is going to go in.” Similarly, during a timeout in a 2015 game, LeBron James told his teammates to pass the ball to Kevin Love, explaining after the game that, “He had the hot hand, I wanted to keep going to him.” On the other hand, statisticians tell us that streaks are likely even in random coin flips that have a rock-steady Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
June 3, 2022

Categorized
Information Theory

Tagged
Advantage players, Claude Shannon, Dice sliders, Edwin Thorp, False shuffle, Featured, Gambling and probability, Law of Large Numbers and gambling, Probability, Robert J. Marks, Salvador Cordova, Shuffle Trackers, Whole cards in Blackjack}

Gambling: WHY the House Always Wins in the Long Run…

_{The casinos are not cheating. They rely on the Law of Large Numbers, part of the mathematical structure underlying our universe} _{News

June 3, 2022

12

Information Theory}

In this week’s podcast, “The house always wins in the long run” (June 2, 2022), Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks interviews mathematician, computer scientist, and engineer Salvador Cordova on a subject on which he has strong views: gambling. Marks tells us, “I teach a graduate course on probability and stochastic processes. There I teach the stupidity of casino gambling. In statistics, there’s a theorem called the Law of Large Numbers. It teaches that you can’t win in the long run at casino games. Period. The law of large numbers is a mathematical truth. It’s a law as serious as the law of gravity. It’s why casinos always get rich and the gambler always gets poor. There is a Read More ›

Father And Son Competing In Video Games At Home

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
July 6, 2021

Categorized
Ethics, Mathematics, Peer Review, Science

Tagged
Fraud, Minecraft, Probability, Stuart Ritchie, Video games}

Why Did Video Gamers Uncover Fraud More Easily Than Scientists?

_{Video gamers are subject, a psychologist tells us, to much more rigorous constraints than scientists} _{News

July 6, 2021

3

Ethics, Mathematics, Peer Review, Science}

In a recent article at The Atlantic, King’s College psychologist Stuart Ritchie, author of Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth (2020), has noted a curious fact: Video gamers are much quicker to spot fraud than scientists. The video game fraud he focuses on involved a gamer’s claim that he had finished a round of Minecraft in a little over 19 minutes, a feat he attributed, Ritchie tells us, to “an incredible stretch of good luck.” “Incredible” is the right choice of word here. “Dream,” as the player was known, later admitted — in the face of skepticism — that he had “inadvertently” left some software running that improved his game — thus disqualifying Read More ›

Futuristic heads up display blue green abstract interface

^{Type
post

Author
Eric Holloway
Date
April 26, 2021

Categorized
Philosophy, Science

Tagged
Benford's Law, Carl Sagan, Chance, Conspiracy theories, design in nature, design inference, Detachability (and design inference), Explanatory Filter, Intelligent design theory, Necessity, Probability, Voter fraud allegations (in U.S.), William Dembski}

How the Explanatory Filter Can Help Quash Conspiracy Theories

_{I found Dembski’s explanatory filter quite helpful in investigating voter fraud claims} _{Eric Holloway

April 26, 2021

10

Philosophy, Science}

William Dembski’s explanatory filter is a decision strategy for identifying events that are unlikely to have happened purely by chance. The filter proceeds in three main steps, which can be illustrated via the plot device in Contact, a novel (1985) by Carl Sagan, followed by a film (1997): Eliminate events of large probability (necessity): A radio telescope receives a pattern of beeps and pauses. Perhaps the pattern seems strange to us but we could just be overinterpreting inevitable space noise. Eliminate events of medium probability (chance): The pattern turns out to be a sequence of prime numbers. However, large randomly generated numbers sometimes feature apparent patterns (five 5s in a row, for example) that don’t signify anything. Specify the event Read More ›

Basketball scoring basket at a sports arena

^{Type
post

Author
Jay Cordes and Gary Smith
Date
January 4, 2021

Categorized
Sports

Tagged
Craig Hodges, Data analysis, Featured, Hot Hand Fallacy, Phantom Pattern Problem (book), Probability, Statistics, Steph Curry}

Steph Curry Got Red Hot and Torched the “Hot Hand Fallacy”

_{Many statisticians dismiss remarkable streaks like his as the Hot Hand Fallacy. Are they right?} _{Jay Cordes and Gary Smith

January 4, 2021

5

Sports}

Is “Hot Hands” really a fallacy, as some claim? Steph Curry is arguably the greatest shooter in National Basketball Association (NBA) history. In 2020, during practice the day after Christmas, Curry demolished that record by making 105 consecutive 3-point shots. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Jonathan Bartlett
Date
November 30, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics

Tagged
Bayes’ Rule, Bayesian reasoning, False positives, Featured, HIV, Probability, Risk, Screening tests, Thomas Bayes}

Can an 18th Century Statistician Help Us Think More Clearly?

_{Distinguishing between types of probability can help us worry less and do more} _{Jonathan Bartlett

November 30, 2020

6

Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics}

Thomas Bayes (1702–1761) (pictured), a statistician and clergyman, developed a theory of decision-making which was only discussed after his death and only became important in the 20th century. It is now a significant topic in philosophy, in the form of Bayesian epistemology. Understanding Bayes’ Rule may be essential to making good decisions. Let’s say that you are a generally healthy person and have no symptoms of any illness and no specific risk factors for any illness. Acting on a friend’s suggestion, you get screened for a variety of diseases, just to be sure. Of the diseases you test for, the HIV test comes back positive. You read on the package that the test is 99.6% accurate. Are you more likely Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
November 29, 2020

Categorized
Science

Tagged
Craig Lent, Enrique Blair, Featured, Invisible Boy (film character), Probability, Quantum Mechanics, quantum superposition, Random number generator (RNG), Robert J. Marks, wave function}

How Scientists Have Learned To Work With the Quantum World

_{It’s still pretty weird, though} _{News

November 29, 2020

7

Science}

In last week’s podcast, “Enrique Blair on quantum computing,” Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks talks with fellow computer engineer Enrique Blair about why quantum mechanics is so strange. But scientists have learned to work with QM, despite many questions, like how to work with particles that can be in two different places (quantum superposition): https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-110-Enrique-Blair.mp3 [Starts at approximately 13:16.] The Show Notes and transcript follow. Excerpts from the transcript: Robert J. Marks: What’s superposition? What’s going on there? Enrique Blair: Quantum superposition is really a mathematical description. We use wave functions to describe these particles. There’s a wave function for the photon going through Slit One and a wave function for the photon going through Slit Two. To Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Gary Smith and Jay Cordes
Date
August 17, 2020

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics

Tagged
Cancer (causes), Electromagnetic fields (EMFs), Featured, Klaus Teuber, Power lines, Probability, Settlers of Catan (board game), Statistics}

In Science, We Can’t Just “Settle” for Data Clusters

_{The board game, Settlers of Catan, offers a clear illustration of what can go wrong when we are duped by data clusters} _{Gary Smith and Jay Cordes

August 17, 2020

7

Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics}

Settlers of Catan is an incredible board game created by Klaus Teuber, a German game designer. It has been translated into dozens of languages and tens of millions of sets have been sold. The basic four-player board consists of 19 hexagons (hexes) representing resources: 3 brick, 4 lumber, 4 wool, 4 grain, 3 ore, and 1 desert. Players acquire and use resources based on dice rolls, card draws, trading, and the location of their settlements and cities. Part of the game’s seductive appeal is that there are many, many ways to arrange the 19 hexagons and successful strategies depend on how the hexagons are arranged. The rules are simple but winning strategies are complex and elusive. The official rules of Read More ›

Business Finance Marketing and Budget Report

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
July 29, 2020

Categorized
Global Technology, Technocracy

Tagged
Arunabh Ghosh, China, India, Making It Count (book), Marxism, Probability, Random sampling, Statistics}

What Happened When 1950s China Dreamed of “Total Information”?

_{When China rejected random sampling in favor of exhaustive enumeration of individuals, masses of “data” flooded in, but what did it mean?} _{News

July 29, 2020

5

Global Technology, Technocracy}

A historian of modern China recounts the outcome of a momentous decision that China’s new Communist rulers made in the 1950s. They decided to abandon conventional methods of gathering statistics that use probability and adopted the method of exhaustive counting of everybody and everything. Why did their dream of total information became a nightmare? Harvard historian Arunabh Ghosh (right), author of Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (2020), explains that in the 1950s, newly communist China faced a choice about how to survey the population accurately while making “a clean break with the past.” For philosophical reasons, debates about how to gather statistics came to the fore: In a speech in 1951, Li Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Eric Holloway
Date
November 20, 2019

Categorized
Machine Learning

Tagged
Clue (board game), decision tree, Entropy, Probability}

Machine Learning: Decision Trees Can Solve Murders

_{Decision trees increase our chance at a right answer. We can see how that works in a mystery board game like Clue} _{Eric Holloway

November 20, 2019

6

Machine Learning}

Entropy is a concept in information theory that characterizes the number of choices available when a probability distribution is involved. Understanding how it works helps us make better guesses.

^{Type
post

Author
Eric Holloway
Date
November 18, 2019

Categorized
Machine Learning

Tagged
Occam's razor, Probability}

Machine Learning: Using Occam’s Razor to Generalize

_{A simple thought experiment shows us how} _{Eric Holloway

November 18, 2019

4

Machine Learning}

This approach is contrary to Fisher's method where we formulate all theories before encountering the data. We came up with the model after we saw the cards we drew.

^{Type
post

Author
Eric Holloway
Date
November 11, 2019

Categorized
Machine Learning, Programming

Tagged
Data snooping, Occam's razor, Probability}

Occam’s Razor Can Shave Away Data Snooping

_{The greater an object's information content, the lower its probability.} _{Eric Holloway

November 11, 2019

4

Machine Learning, Programming}

One technique to avoid data snooping is based on the intersection of information theory and probability: An object’s probability is related to its information content. The greater an object’s information content, the lower its probability. We measure a model’s information content as the logarithmic difference between the probability that the data occurred by chance and the number of bits required to store the model. The negative exponential of the difference is the model’s probability of occurring by chance. If the data cannot be compressed, then these two values are equal. Then the model has zero information and we cannot know if the data was generated by chance or not. For a dataset that is incompressible and uninformative, swirl some tea Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Roman Yampolskiy
Date
November 5, 2019

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence

Tagged
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Bayesian surprise, Probability}

How Do We Know What Superintelligent AI Will Do?

_{If superintelligent systems existed, logic demonstrates that they would be unpredictable} _{Roman Yampolskiy

November 5, 2019

14

Artificial Intelligence}

A lower intelligence can’t accurately predict all decisions of a higher intelligence, a concept known as Vinge’s Principle.

^{Type
post

Author
Gary Smith
Date
October 22, 2019

Categorized
Sports

Tagged
Baseball, Luck, Probability, Statistics, World Series}

The World Series: What the Luck?

_{Who will win the World Series? I don’t know, but I do know that baseball is the quintessential game of luck} _{Gary Smith

October 22, 2019

6

Sports}

Think about it. Line drives hit right at fielders, mis-hit balls dying in the infield. Fly balls barely caught and barely missed. Balls called strikes and strikes called balls. Even the best batters make twice as many outs as hits. Even the best teams lose more than a third of their games. This season, the Houston Astros had the highest win percentage (66.0%) in baseball, yet they lost two out of six games to Baltimore, which only won a third of their games—not because Baltimore was the better team, but because Baltimore was the luckier team in those two games. The Astros are one of the 10 best teams this season (along with the Yankees, Tampa Bay, Minnesota, Cleveland, Oakland, Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Gary Smith
Date
August 12, 2019

Categorized
Business and Finance, Sports, Work

Tagged
Golf, Luck, Probability, Skill, Sports}

The Paradox of Luck and Skill

_{Why did Shane Lowry win the British Open golf championship? Because someone had to} _{Gary Smith

August 12, 2019

6

Business and Finance, Sports, Work}

In any competition including academic tests, athletic events, and company management where there is an element of luck that causes performances to be an imperfect measure of ability, there is an important difference between competitions among people with high ability and competitions among people of lesser ability.