2024 LC Thread

https://x.com/KnightsbyBen/status/1840879616833016280

This was my original thought. If the range is infinite, then the probability R lands between the two numbers should be vanishingly small, right?

How do you even get a random number from an infinite range? Can someone show me that number?

Vanishingly small, but always positive.

I’m still queasy about the idea of a random number from an infinite range. No matter what number you come up with, there will always be infinite numbers bigger than it.

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Well I don’t understand this at all, in addition to being dumb I am missing something. Anyway, I am probably playing the opposite of this. If Spidercrab tells me the first number is a billion and two I am still switching. I know what you are up to.

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The random number is between 0 and 1.

If you read the replies on that twitter thread they’re not assuming that at all. They’re also talking about negative numbers. They’re saying you don’t know the range, which I think is crucial to the game.

If you know the range is between 0 and 1, then you just pick again if the first number is below .50000000, right?

The random number is drawn from a distribution with mean 0 and standard deviation 1, but is bounded by -infinity and +infinity.

oh, duh, that makes more sense

Here is a fun one I just heard. Let’s say I take a random number between 0 and 1 and take the square root. Then I take two random numbers between 0 and 1 and take the higher of the two.

How do these two processes compare?

They’re the same thing

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https://x.com/FoxNews/status/1841547793971761653

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Never heard of him.

Taylor Swift’s boyfriend’s brother.

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…and former professional footballer (American) where he took repeated head injury inducing collisions.

Dumb. if first picked number is far from zero i simply bet the other would be closer to zero. Thanks for nothing, math nerds

An NFL player is a meathead? Holy crap, this is big news.

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There’s a fairly long history of experts not being able to accept that simple statistical algorithms outperform them. Before AI. Before moneyball. Someday I’ll look up that one paper. Maybe even read it.

Another fan of Matt Parker, perhaps?

This is from a few weeks ago: