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jake cleman

YouTube - Understanding Odds: Bayes Theorem - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

probability Bayes Theorem v63.0233.2009Su

shared by jake cleman on 14 Jul 09 - Cached
  • jake cleman on 14 Jul 09
     
    Understanding Odds: Bayes Theorem
  • jake cleman on 14 Jul 09
     
    Understanding Odds: Bayes Theorem
Matthew Leingang

Lifelong debunker takes on arbiter of neutral choices - 0 views

news.stanford.edu/...diaconis-69.html

shared by Matthew Leingang on 16 Jul 09 - Cached
  • A decade later, in 2002, a large manufacturer of card-shuffling machines for casinos summoned Diaconis to determine whether their new automated shufflers truly randomized the deck. (They didn't.)
    • Matthew Leingang
      Matthew Leingang on 20 Jul 09
       
      I saw him talk about this. It was fascinating, especially when you consider that the problem is computationally very hard. The number of "shuffles" (permutations of a 52-card deck) exceeds the number of atoms in our galaxy, so it's impossible to build a computer with that much memory.
  • Sam V on 16 Jul 09
     
    A biography about magician-turned-mathematician (probabilist) Persi Diaconis as well as a look at his experiments to understand the bias of a coin flip.
  • Matthew Leingang on 20 Jul 09
     
    Great article. Everything I've been saying about Diaconis I learned through oral tradition. It's good to know I was pretty much right on.
  • Sam V on 21 Jul 09
     
    Funny, after reading the article I concluded that you must've either read this article or a similar biographical sketch. Diaconis must be some legend! One of my favorite parts was that he was a bit 'rough' at one point. Gives the rest of us some hope!
John Muccini

Behind Monty Hall's Doors: Puzzle, Debate and Answer? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-puzzle-debate-and-answer.html

v63.0233.2009Su puzzle conditional probability Monty Hall problem

shared by John Muccini on 14 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Matthew Leingang on 14 Jul 09
     
    Although I did not enter the debate, I remember the Marilyn vos Savant vs. the mathematicians episode. I was in high school at the time. Marilyn's solution is sound, and her tactics are indeed wise: to people who disagreed with her explanation, she suggested they simply experiment and see what they find. So both the Bayesian and frequency models of probability are brought into play here. Persi Diaconis, the carnival card shark turned Harvard mathematics professor who I mentioned in class, is also quoted in this article. The Marilyn vs. the Mathematicians rematch did not turn out so well for her. When Wiles and Taylor finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem, she pronounced it phony because she didn't understand it. The mathematical consensus remains that the proof is good.
Matthew Leingang

The Mathematics of Magic: The Gathering - 0 views

www.kibble.net/magic01.php

shared by Matthew Leingang on 04 Jul 09 - Cached
    • Matthew Leingang
      Matthew Leingang on 06 Jul 09
       
      Interesting point. I think there's a lot of math behind designing any popular game involving chance. For instance, legend has it the game High-Ho Cherry-O! was engineered to make the expected game length about equal to the attention span of the children playing it. Here you have a case of designers not understanding the game they were developing. Casino games seem simple enough to attract interest (and pay often enough to keep it) but still manage to benefit the house.
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