Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 21:59:52 02/01/02
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On February 02, 2002 at 00:40:26, pavel wrote: [snip] >Ok I perhaps didn't say it the way I wanted to. >What i wanted to say is that chess games cannot be related to tosing coins, (no >I didn't mean stats, but tossing coin is what I meant), becase while tossing >coins there are 2 probabilities, and there is nothing associated with it for a >certain probability to take place, (why would there be more heads then tails?) >While is chess this is not the case. For every event, the sum of all possibilites is equal to 1. So, for instance, throwing a penny, we have: 0.5 - epsilon/2 chance of heads. 0.5 - epsilon/2 chance of tails. epsilon chance of landing on the edge or some other strange thing (vaporized by a lazer beam for instance). With a chess game, we have several possible outcomes: The game is won The game is lost The game is drawn The game is discontinued The game is never started Something strange we have not thought of. Whatever the odds of those things occuring, the sum of their probabilities is exactly 1. In the even of the 1st three things, there will be a total of one point awarded. [snip] >Chess games and tossing coins just doesn't seem right. All events have some randomness associated with them. A light switch -- we flip it on and the light goes on (maybe). Maybe the switch goes bad (quite unlikely, but I had it happen in my house). Maybe the bulb burns out or is burned out. Maybe the power goes off right at that instant. Probably -- it goes on. But before the event has occurred or not occurred we really don't know which it will be (or something else altogether unplanned: There is no lightbulb in the socket). Not only do I think that our events are not predetermined, I think that (paraphrasing a wise saying): "Unforseen circumstances happen to us all."
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