In a magazine recently there was a discussion about probability.
The author asserted that the probability of the event in question was approximately
(1 - 10-21)1025
How small is this number?
(In reply to
This is a notation trick by Seth)
0.9 * 0.9 = 0.81
0.99 * 0.99 = 0.9801
0.999 * 0.999 = 0.998001
If you multiply the number more times...
0.99 ^ 45 = 0.63618548606387122457727826959944
0.99 ^ 100 = 0.36603234127322950493061602657252
So if you add an insane amount of nines (this number should have about 21 9's or so), and add a larger exponent...
0.999999999999999999999999999999 ^ 45 = .999999999999999999999999999955
0.999999999999999999999999999999 ^ 200 = 0.9999999999999999999999999998
And so you can pretty much imagine the number is almost equal to 1, and therefore, extrapolating for more 9's and for a larger exponent, the probability of that event is near 100%.
I may have it wrong, but it's what I can gather from this.
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Posted by Alexis
on 2006-08-22 01:19:09 |