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solvo asked in Science & MathematicsPhysics · 1 decade ago

theory on odds/probability?

Here is a little scenario that proves that 2 outcomes, one with a greater chance of happening, still each have a 50% chance of occurring each time.

Say there is a roulette wheel containing 70 black squares and 30 red. Somebody spins the roulette wheel 100 times and records whether the ball landed on black or red for each spin. It is your job to guess the outcome of each spin. Get them all right and you win one million dollars. Naturally, this is impossible to do, but hey, your willing to give it a shot. You begin by figuring that 70 of the spins ended up being black and 30 ended up being red. You don't know this for sure, but the odds say that this is most likely what happened. Now, how do you choose which ones are black and which are red? You have nothing to go on. You cant say that spin 46 has a better chance of being red than 76 or that spin 23 has a better chance of being black than 57. The only thing you can do now is choose at random, which 70 were black and which 30 were red. Now, because you can't say one is more likely than the other at being a specific color, that means that each one has an equal chance of being black as red. In other words..... Each spin has a 50/50 chance of being black as being red!

In conclusion, odds of black vs red for one spin: 50/50

odds from 100 spins: 70/30

This goes against how most people view odds, I understand that....But just think about this and tell me what you think.

Update:

Bimbo, I wish I could have been there arguing it with you :)

Update 2:

I should add that saying you have a 50/50 chance is not the right way to word it, it is really 100/0 or 0/100....I guess 50/50 is an easier way to comprehend that.

Update 3:

huckleberry, I guess my point is that people are insisting that each spin in the set of 100 done all have a greater chance of being black than red. But you have no clue which ones turned out to be red/black. So how can you say that one spin has a better chance of being one of the 70 black ones or one of the 30 red ones than another? They all have an equal chance of being both colors.

Update 4:

huckleberry, I have discovered that the 50/50 I am referring to, is a different set of odds than the 70/30 that everyone is talking about. I am referring to the fact that each spin in the set of 100 spins that were done in my example, all have the same chance of being one of the black spins, or one of the red spins. In other words: An equal chance of being a black spin, or a red spin. The way I've been wording it has been confusing to people. I also should not have used 50/50 to describe it. I was treating 'an equal chance' as meaning the same thing as 50/50.

Update 5:

And I completely agree that nothing is random, it can only seem random because we are unaware of the influences on it.

2 Answers

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  • 1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    *Edit #3*

    --------------

    "I have discovered that the 50/50 I am referring to, is a different set of odds than the 70/30 that everyone is talking about"

    As I suspected.

    "In other words: An equal chance of being a black spin, or a red spin. The way I've been wording it has been confusing to people."

    Are you talking about the fact the the wheel has no memory? So if you spin Red 9 times in a row, the probability of Red on the 10th spin doesn't change?

  • 1 decade ago

    :D finally someone who thought of this. you should have seen me in class trying to prove this to my teacher x.x

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