Monday 23 July 2007

Beating the high odds

I'm starting to suspect that the 7-11 near the office will never give me a winning Snickers bar in the current "1 in 6 bars wins" give-away. I've been rather unlucky so far. I'd expect to have won twice so far if the bars were strictly "every sixth one wins", which they're not.

My chances of encountering a loser bar each time is 5/6 or 83.3%. Over twelve bars, that decreases to 11% - more suspicious, but not beyond chance yet. I need to buy 17 bars and have them all lose before I can be justly suspicious by my understanding of statistics. By that stage, the chances of me encountering all losing bars would be less than 5%.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I expect I'll tire of the chase before then.
PPS - But not the chocolate.

2 comments:

Erin Marie said...

Codflammit!

I had a really good comment for this post, but I switched pages for a minute and forgot it.

Probably something about paranoia.

*sigh*

It's the old age setting in already.

John said...

I probably am being a bit paranoid. It's just frustrating.

Also, I don't seem to see the competition bars in Woolworths when I'm there. Maybe all this is a scam to trick me into buying chocolate.

Though it's never been necessary to trick me before...