Example of event with 1 in 17 million odds

[Hawkingfan]

Here is an interesting video that shows a very unusual event that had only a 1 in 17 million chance of happening.

I am a fan of the game of backgammon, love to play it and watch it. Here is a few minutes from a match between world champion Masayuki Mochizuki (“Mochy”) and Alexandra Knupfer from the 2019 New York Metro Open a couple weeks ago.

The incredible thing is that for about a 2-minute stretch as highlighted in the 3 minute video, Alexandra (the player at the bottom of the screen) rolls two, tournament-quality “precision” dice in a lipped cup twelve times in a row and neither dice rolls a 4, 5, or 6. You don’t have to know how to play backgammon to understand what is going on in the video as far as the dice rolling. If you know how to play, you’ll note that strategically, she never had to move her two back checkers and “break” her board to the 3 point. Really incredible.

The odds of 24 rolls of the die yielding no 4s, 5s, or 6s is 1 in 17,000,000.

And actually, these types of things happen in backgammon quite often. Every player has their own stories. Things that have a million to 1 chance of happening happen every day. Just wish more theists realized it.

 

[Gun Nut]

I have played a lot of backgammon in my time... a whole lot. I disagreed with one move that white made... apart from that, they played by the book. Backgammon is about making the best of a bad situation...minimizing potential loss... at least, that is how I approach the game.
I feel like there have been plenty of times I *never* rolled a 6 to get out of the back game... and times when I rolled double 1s / 1,2 like a billion times in a row when I was in a running game.
People that play a lot of backgammon have rolled a lot of dice. Doesn't that change the perception of the odds of not rolling what you need?
Isn't it different when you look at the past 10 games, versus just looking at the last 10 rolls of the current game? Like, if they rolled dozens of 6s last game, wouldn't the "odds of never rolling a 6" not look so bad across both games? Not sure I am making sense.

 

[steve_bank]

The thing is with low peobalities events do happen.

Play enough poker and you will see once in a while the highest hand can ne dealt to someone without having to draw cards.

 

[bigfield]

Some people can't wrap their heads around the idea that even the staggeringly improbable is, given enough time, downright common.

 

[untermensche]

What are the odds of being born?

Astronomically higher than 1 out of 17 million.

Unfathomable.

 

[Gun Nut]

I am fascinated with 52! (52 factorial)

Some good youtube videos out there that describe that number very well... the number of all possible arrangements of a deck of cards.

If you are not familiar, do check it out... after all, never, in all of the history of the universe, has a shuffled deck of cards been in the same configuration twice... that is to say, the odds of that happening are close enough to "simply impossible".

Lets say you are capable of shuffling a deck of cards very well in just 1 second. Set a timer and start shuffling, noting the order of cards after every 1 second long good shuffle. I will stand on the equator of Earth for 1 billion years while you shuffle the cards. After 1 billion years, I will take a single step to the west. After another 1 billion years, I will take another step... you continue to shuffle the cards.
Once I have traveled that way (1 footstep every 1 billion years) around the entire planet, I remove 1 drop of water from the ocean. You are still shuffling the cards, once every second. I then repeat the process of walking around the equator of Earth, 1 footstep every 1 billion years, and upon completing the circle remove another single drop of water.
Keep shuffling... you have not yet made every possible combination of cards in the deck...
Once all of the water on Earth has been removed that way, place a piece of paper on the ground and all the water you removed magically reappears on Earth. So, start all over again and at the end of each cycle of emptying the ocean, one drop at a time, after walking the earth at a rate of 1 footstep every 1 billion years, place another piece of paper on top of the stack you are creating.
Repeat that entire process until your stack of paper reaches the sun.

how many times have you shuffled the cards (1 second per good shuffle)? 52 factorial? Nope. You will have to start all over again and repeat all of that another 256 Billion times.

So.. what ARE the odds you have seen the same deck of cards twice? basically never in the history of the universe.. and certainly never in the history of poker.

 

[untermensche]

It is what allows people to play hand after hand.

No pattern to how the cards end up in your hand can be discerned.

 

[Hawkingfan]

I have played a lot of backgammon in my time... a whole lot. I disagreed with one move that white made... apart from that, they played by the book. Backgammon is about making the best of a bad situation...minimizing potential loss... at least, that is how I approach the game.
I feel like there have been plenty of times I *never* rolled a 6 to get out of the back game... and times when I rolled double 1s / 1,2 like a billion times in a row when I was in a running game.
People that play a lot of backgammon have rolled a lot of dice. Doesn't that change the perception of the odds of not rolling what you need?
Isn't it different when you look at the past 10 games, versus just looking at the last 10 rolls of the current game? Like, if they rolled dozens of 6s last game, wouldn't the "odds of never rolling a 6" not look so bad across both games? Not sure I am making sense.

Yeah, that makes sense. Your perception of not rolling a number look better when it is smoothed out over a period of games as opposed to over a period of rolls over the current game.

Anyway, backgammon is a great game for realizing that rare events occur with regular frequency, according to the odds (because of the dice), and in the grand scheme of things rare events occur each and every day, as dictated by the odds accordingly.

In backgammon, a case in point is rolling doubles in a row. As you know, the first roll is made by both players rolling 1 die, and if the roll is any double (1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, or 6s), then both players re-roll the die. To roll 3 doubles in a row is 215 to 1. To roll 4 doubles in a row is 1295 to 1. Those are rare events that one can experience quite frequently in accordance with the odds if one plays enough backgammon regularly.

 

[steve_bank]

Back in the 90s on a twin engine commercial jet first the generator on one engine failed. Not a big problem with redundancy and battery backop. Later the electrical generator on the other engine failed. The jet had an emergency gas turbine generator, a small jet engine sticking out of the tail. They tried to start it with the emergency batteries and the batteries failed. Turned out there was a problem in the battery charger.

The odds of three failures leading to complete electrical failure was very small but it happened. What saved the day was that the control surfaces had cables running to the yoke in the cockpit.

 

[steve_bank]

The Ampere, the Ohm, the Newton, Gilbert, Tesla units after people. I believe the atom came from the Greeks. They theorized a small indivisible particle that contained the properties of the macroscopic material.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-idea-of-the-ancient-Greeks-on-the-atom
Nov 12, 2018 ... The word “atom” was actually coined by the ancient Greek natural philosopher Democritus — it means “uncuttable”. He theorized that all matter was made of ...

 

[Shake]

The thing is with low probabilities events do happen.

Especially given enough time.

Some people can't wrap their heads around the idea that even the staggeringly improbable is, given enough time, downright common.

And this is where some creationists often run afoul of things, by talking about how improbable evolution, or even abiogenesis, is given the staggering odds against it.

It's kind of amazing how often the fact that highly improbable does not equal impossible is missed by people.