Can anyone explain Rivals?

[Michael]

Just a further observation about probability and luck, and why therefore the machine as explained doesn't make sense. Let's take a simple, quintessential game of chance: The coin-toss.

Every time you toss a coin, there's a fifty percent chance it will land heads, and a fifty percent chance it will land tails. If you have tossed the coin forty times already and every time it has landed heads, the chances of it landing heads again are still equal to it landing tails as it was the first time. But it's improbable that you will get this exact string of heads. For that matter, any specific combination of heads and tails for those forty coin tosses are equally improbable. The more complex any hypothetical situation is, the automatically more improbable it becomes. The specific fact of me having my name, wearing clothes, speaking English, in the room I am, using the kind of computer I am, posting where I am, and so on, all put together is a very improbable outcome.

The episode of "Rivals" only works if you assume things that happen tend to be probable, and rare occurences are improbable, and this is therefore reversed.

But what if your hypothetical coin lands on its edge?

 

[erastus25]

Just a further observation about probability and luck, and why therefore the machine as explained doesn't make sense. Let's take a simple, quintessential game of chance: The coin-toss.

Every time you toss a coin, there's a fifty percent chance it will land heads, and a fifty percent chance it will land tails. If you have tossed the coin forty times already and every time it has landed heads, the chances of it landing heads again are still equal to it landing tails as it was the first time. But it's improbable that you will get this exact string of heads. For that matter, any specific combination of heads and tails for those forty coin tosses are equally improbable. The more complex any hypothetical situation is, the automatically more improbable it becomes. The specific fact of me having my name, wearing clothes, speaking English, in the room I am, using the kind of computer I am, posting where I am, and so on, all put together is a very improbable outcome.

The episode of "Rivals" only works if you assume things that happen tend to be probable, and rare occurences are improbable, and this is therefore reversed.

But what if your hypothetical coin lands on its edge?

Then whoever threw the coin will be able to read the minds of those around him/her.

 

[Kegek]

But what if your hypothetical coin lands on its edge?

Granted. I was assuming for simplistically's sake that the coin doesn't land on its edge, or falls into a gutter and is lost, and so on. The short answer is that things are even less probable than my simplified explanation suggests.

 

[chrisspringob]

But what if your hypothetical coin lands on its edge?

Then you should appoint Jimmy Stewart to the U.S. Senate.