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Re: Dice
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Re: Dice


  • Subject: Re: Dice
  • From: Graff <email@hidden>
  • Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 23:31:46 -0400

On Oct 26, 2004, at 10:23 PM, Bill Briggs wrote:

At 9:56 PM -0400 10/26/04, Graff wrote:
On Oct 26, 2004, at 3:39 PM, John C. Welch wrote:

On 10/26/2004 13:28, "Graff" <email@hidden> wrote:

So no, it doesn't seem to be perfect but it's probably good enough
for most applications.

Out of curiosity, what would the std deviation be if the random was perfect?

A perfectly even distribution would be for every value to show up the
same number of times. In that case the std deviation would be 0.

However, a perfectly even distribution is not, by definition, perfectly
random, or even close.

Well a fairly even distribution over the long term is a semi-decent indicator of randomness. Of course it doesn't necessarily mean that the sample is random as you can have even distributions that are not random.

Check this out. It's a lottery called 6/49. The numbers come out of one of those bingo cage things full of little balls. No digital technology involved. Note the unevenness of the histogram, even considering that there are a few hundred draws in the data. It should be a good random process, btu the histogram is not "evenly distributed".


http://lottery.sympatico.msn.ca/cgi-bin/english? job=frequency_chart&lottery_name=na_lotto_649&order=0&years=0

Let's see, from that data I get a standard deviation of approximately 19. So 68% of the data is within 309 ± 19, or 290 - 329.


Yep, sounds fairly even to me.

Besides, who says that a "bingo cage things full of little balls" is a good random number generator. For all we know some balls weigh a bit more, are slightly larger, or are out of round. Hell, maybe even the contest is fixed in some way. I've always suspected that of the lottery...

- Ken
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  • Follow-Ups:
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      • From: Bill Briggs <email@hidden>
References: 
 >Re: Dice (From: "John C. Welch" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Dice (From: Graff <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Dice (From: Bill Briggs <email@hidden>)

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