I accidently clicked on Homer Buddha and ....
^^^ Nice! <-- Jealous.
Forum Discussion
I'll let you know why there *appeared* to be a pattern of people consistently getting 30 to 150 donuts gifted, but then when other people tried it also it actually turned out not to be any more likely than usual.
It turns out that in a random set of numbers, there ALWAYS _must_ be occasions where the same number keeps coming up over and over again for awhile. Like if you flip a coin a hundred times, there'll be times when it comes up with like 9 heads in a row, and then at some point there'll be 9 tails in a row. So on average overall on any particular flip there's always a 50/50 chance of getting heads or tails, but when you see that string of 9 heads in a row your human pattern-seeking brain *thinks* that it's a weird non-random pattern that's happening, but in reality it actually is still totally random.
In fact, this is how investigators discover and prove that a person is manipulating the outcome of a process that's supposed to be random, because humans expect a random sequence to not have too many repeated numbers. So if someone tries to fake a sequence of random outcomes then they'll pick numbers that almost never repeat one after another in a row, so all the investigators do is look through the supposedly-random numbers and look for a LACK of repeated numbers in a row, which immediately shows that these numbers actually AREN'T randomly generated
Tl;dr random processes MUST have periods where the same outcome gets repeated in a row for a little while, but this is NOT an indication that the odds of the next chance's outcome will be any different than the normal odds.
It turns out that in a random set of numbers, there ALWAYS _must_ be occasions where the same number keeps coming up over and over again for awhile. Like if you flip a coin a hundred times, there'll be times when it comes up with like 9 heads in a row, and then at some point there'll be 9 tails in a row. So on average overall on any particular flip there's always a 50/50 chance of getting heads or tails, but when you see that string of 9 heads in a row your human pattern-seeking brain *thinks* that it's a weird non-random pattern that's happening, but in reality it actually is still totally random.
In fact, this is how investigators discover and prove that a person is manipulating the outcome of a process that's supposed to be random, because humans expect a random sequence to not have too many repeated numbers. So if someone tries to fake a sequence of random outcomes then they'll pick numbers that almost never repeat one after another in a row, so all the investigators do is look through the supposedly-random numbers and look for a LACK of repeated numbers in a row, which immediately shows that these numbers actually AREN'T randomly generated
Tl;dr random processes MUST have periods where the same outcome gets repeated in a row for a little while, but this is NOT an indication that the odds of the next chance's outcome will be any different than the normal odds.
