ELI5 how I don’t get 50 heads and 50 tails when flipping 100 coins

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What’s the mathematical law around this?

In: Mathematics

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

In probability, the general rule is that as the population you are looking at increases, the distribution inside that population will more reliably resemble the statistical distribution.

For instance, if 10% of people are left-handed and you are looking at a population of a billion people, you can very safely say that there will be roughly 100 million left-handed people, with only a very tiny variation from that, probably hundredths of a percent.

If you are dealing with a population of 10 people, on the other hand, it is not that unlikely that you will have no left-handed people or two left-handed people, and those situations represent significant deviations from the statistical distribution.

The sub-discipline of probability that has to deal with these differences from statistical ideals that we see in small populations is called stochastics. Any chance you can find math that gives you some insights into just how big a deviation you would expect in any given population size, for instance.

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