I have a truly burning question.
If you pick a number 1-10 100 times completely randomly and each number has a 10% chance of being picked each time (so picking a 7 once doesn’t decrease the likelihood of picking it on the next try) why won’t you end up with 10 of each number?
In: 1
It’s called the Law of Small Numbers.
I just went and flipped a fair coin, and it landed on heads. Cool! Because it’s a fair coin, and the odds are 50/50 of heads or tails, I should get heads half the time and tails half the time, right?
But what would make it get tails next time? Does God Himself flip the coin in midair to make sure it ends up tails and stays fair? I just flipped it again and got heads, apparently not!
The short answer is: the odds of flipping a coin are _always_ 50/50, no matter what the last coin flip was or what the last 100 were.
But if I flip 100,000 coins, there’s a very high chance that just about 50,000 of them end up heads and 50,000 end up tails, give or take a few extra heads or tails. That’s called the Law of Large Numbers.
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