peter at abbnm.com (Peter da Silva) wrote:
> In article <81jmfs$fv2$1 at pyrite.mv.net>, Bill Todd <billtodd at foo.mv.com>
wrote:
> > Am I the only one who believes that 'random' means that the probabilities
of
> > all possible outcomes are equal?
> I would hope so. Stay out of Vegas.
Note that most physical processes that are used in Las Vegas are not
completely random.
The best story I read some 20 years ago about roulette in Monaco. A couple
of friends well-educated in the physical sciences studied several roulette
tables in a well-known establishment. It turned out small deviations from
purely random distributions over all possible outcomes were observed.
The end result was that the casino moved the tables every week, to offset
biases due to small aberrations from the horizontal ....
Las Vegas - here I come (actually, just for the 151st meeting of the Fortran
Standardization Committee :-)
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