Quote:
Originally posted by THEINCREDIBLEdork:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by DJ FC:
If we tried an infinite number of times I can guarentee that we would win.
No matter how small the odds are... infinity wins.
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You don't know that.</font>[/quote]I agree with FC there. To set it up mathematically...
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There's a very real chance that I'm completely wrong with something I'm about to say. My apologies in advance.</font>
Say the odds of winning the lottery are 1/100 for any given ticket.
If you buy one ticket, your chances of winning are 1/100 (we just said that...)
If you buy two tickets, your chances are 199/10,000 (or 1.99/100)
Three tickets = 29,701/1,000,000 (2.9701/100)
Ten tickets = 90,438,207,500,880,449,001/100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (9.4xxxx/100)
100 tickets = 63.xxx/100
As you can see, the more you buy...the better your chances, though each successive ticket's added value is just a little bit smaller than the ticket before it.
In general, where N is the number of tickets that you have, your chances of winning are (100^N - 99^N)/100^N. If you were to buy something like...a trillion tickets, each with an independent 1/100 shot of winning, your total chances would be 99.9999999999999+a fuckload of 9's/100...but
not 100/100. That said, the more tickets you buy...the larger your chances out of 100 become. If you take the limit of N in the previous equation ((100^N - 99^N)/100^N) as N approaches infinity, you get 1...or 100/100 (meaning you'll always win).
What's that mean? It basically means that FC's entire argument is true...so long as you're dealing with a situation with finite possibilities. No clue how it'd work with infinite possibilities...and I really don't want to think about it right now either.