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Probability in Actuality

MuraRengan

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A couple years ago I came up with the idea that given an infinite span of time, any event that has the possibility to occur will occur an infinite amount of times, no matter how small the probability.

Thinking about it again recently, I think I might have been wrong somewhere, because I also think it's true that as long as the probability of the event is not 100%, it is possible for the even to never actually occur.

I'll give an example to show what I mean: You have a die, and you throw it an infinite amount of times. Is it inevitable the die will land on every number at some point, or is it possible that chance would have it that it never land on a number or numbers?

Please give me some thoughts on this.
 

rvkevin

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Suppose you have a coin and you want to see what would happen flipping it a bunch of times. Of course, its easy to calculate the probability of all heads, its (.5)^N, where N is how many times you flip the coin. Now, when N approaches infinity, the probability of flipping only heads approaches zero. However, there is one sequence where you can be successful, so it doesn't actually get to zero and you can see that for every value for N you plug in, it will return a non-zero result.

Now, when you analyze it based on an actually infinite series, not just an absurdly large number of flips, you get a different result. There is one sequence that is a success, yet now there an infinite number of sequences that result in failure, so the probability is zero. So while (.5)^N for large values of N results in an actual number, the limit of the same function as N approaches infinity results in zero; so you get a different answer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely#Tossing_a_coin
 

MuraRengan

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So then, what's your personal opinion on the subject? Do you think that if given and infinite amount of trials then all possible things will have to happen?
 

rvkevin

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So then, what's your personal opinion on the subject? Do you think that if given and infinite amount of trials then all possible things will have to happen?
Infinity is not a number. At no point in time will you have an infinite amount of trials. Also, things that have a time component will be possible yet not repeatable. For example, it's possible that the 5th flip will be heads, but it wasn't and we're never going to have another 5th flip again so it was possible yet never going to happen.
 

MuraRengan

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Infinity is not a number. At no point in time will you have an infinite amount of trials. Also, things that have a time component will be possible yet not repeatable. For example, it's possible that the 5th flip will be heads, but it wasn't and we're never going to have another 5th flip again so it was possible yet never going to happen.
I'm asking purely theoretically. I'm not concerned with the way things actually are, I'd just like you to give me your opinion on the matter as it is presented in theory.There is much debate to be had as to whether or not infinity can exist in actuality, so I'm not going in that area.
 

T-block

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To expand on rvkevin's mathematics approach, let's take the example of tossing a die. You're asking whether it is possible that the die never lands on 1. We can calculate the probability that we see at least one 1 after N trials by (1 - (5/6)^N). It should be obvious that as we let N grow arbitrarily large, the probability that we will see at least one 1 goes to 100%. Even if you let the chance of success change from 1/6 to, say, 1/1000000000, then the probability becomes (1 - (999999999/1000000000)^N), which will still go to 1 as N becomes arbitrarily large. In fact, no matter how small the chance of success, as long as it is non-zero, the probability will be 1.

You might see no 1's for the first ten thousand throws. You might see ten thousand 5's in a row; it's improbable, but possible. But as you let the number of trials go to infinity, you will see all possible outcomes.
 

Dre89

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Maybe I'm stupid, but the OP's question doesn't really make sense to me. Anything that has a possibility of occuring in an infinite sequence can also occur in a finite sequence (unless the event actually requires an infinite, eg. an infinite sequence of X), it's just that the probability will be less due to their being less time for it to actuate.

Also, certain things are probably not going to increase in probability if time is infinite. For example, the laws of time and space changing is a possibility, but that is something that will probably never change.
 

_Keno_

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Given infinite time, any event which can possibly happen WILL happen as long as there are infinite "attempts". Otherwise either the event has a probability 0 and cannot possibly happen or there was only a limited number of attempts and they all failed.

The example of a "5th flip being heads" is not a valid counter-example to this. There is only one 5th attempt, not a infinite amount.


For example, the laws of time and space changing is a possibility, but that is something that will probably never change.
Why do people say this, what tells us that it is possible for the laws of time and space to change? Has this ever been shown? (I'm actually asking because im slightly frustrated as to why people say this).

It may be the fact that if the laws were slightly different, the universe could still exist (though i have my doubts), but this does not imply that there is a possiblity of change.
 

Skadorski

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I believe it's impossible to truly "grasp" the concept of infinity. What I mean by this is that if we were to use it in a math problem we wouldn't know what to do with it. For example, we cannot solve (0.5)^x because we do not know what "x" is.
If we were to flip a coin an infinite amount of times, the odds of landing all heads is probably lower than landing at least one heads because of our current understanding of numbers and chances.

Why do people say this, what tells us that it is possible for the laws of time and space to change? Has this ever been shown? (I'm actually asking because im slightly frustrated as to why people say this).

It may be the fact that if the laws were slightly different, the universe could still exist (though i have my doubts), but this does not imply that there is a possiblity of change.
I believe it's the "Will the sun rise tomorrow?" argument. It's not that any scientific research shows it can happen, but the fact we have no proof it will not happen.

:038:
 

eg0r

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Suppose we flip a coin forever. Can it happen that the result is always heads? The theoretical answer is yes. The model we use allows for this event to be an outcome. However, the probability we assign to this event is 0. So events with probability 0 can indeed happen! This may seem surprising, until you understand that a "probability" is only a number, which is designed to measure something. However, what it measures is not always what you expect. In other words, just because we've assigned the number 0 to some event, doesn't mean it cannot happen.
 

Thor

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The flaw with assuming an event will happen inevitably because it is not zero makes the assumption that events are created equal and that there is diminishing probability of the event not happening. I argue that certain events, just because they would not necessarily never happen, still may never happen anyway. Also, said events could occur infinite times because a fraction of infinity is infinity (and the law of large numbers) (calculus makes understanding this last tenet easier). Warning - large wall of text - maybe skip to conclusion to avoid numerous details unless you wish to respond to my conclusions, which is in a light blue color.

1. Coin flipping is an example of this situation in favor of saying an event (a tails) not guaranteed not to happen will LIKELY eventually happen, but may not actually ever happen. The odds of the i-th flip of the coin being the first tails flipped in a sequence is (1/2^i), because (for i = 5) the odds of 4 heads in a row is 1/16 (2^4) and the odds of a tails the next flip are 1/2, and the events are independent, so 1/16 * 1/2 = 1/32. Thus it is POSSIBLE that no tails is ever flipped, but the odds as we flip infinitely many times becomes lim(n-> infinity) [1/(2^n)] = 0, so mathematically if you could flip it an infinite number of times the odds of all heads is zero, except that it's impossible to flip it an infinite number of times and so there is always a small positive chance, although I'd put my money on the calculus of limits and say no, there will be a tails eventually (assuming a fair coin and fair flip).

2. Some events are not as simple as a coin flip, hence the odds happening vary wildly, from it being possible/guaranteed to it never happening. I'll go with the extreme example to make it easy - nuclear war. Yes, the odds of a nuclear war happening are non-zero (a nuke could be launched and more could follow, in a war). But there are certain events that must occur that are NOT a "flip of the coin" so to speak that make the odds so close to zero that it is arguable (through limit calculus) the realistic odds are zero. For instance, there would need to be a situation where the benefits of launching nuclear weapons outweighted (almost surely) inevitable retaliation. I will make some assumptions here that you may take issue with, but given retaliation odds of 100%, and odds near zero that a state will become so totalitarian and vicious that it will either deploy nukes or not accept unconditional masurrender, a rational human being will not take the risk of launching nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons could belong to fundamentally irrational people, but (assumption you can critique) those people chose to engage in acts of terrorism rather than look to work through the state, and their assaults on the state would (another assumption) result in multilateral national backlash, precluding actual dominance by an irrational power. Thus, the barricades to launching nuclear weapons (I've identified 2), are so astronomically difficult to surmount, that the odds of a nuclear weapon being launched, even as time goes to infinity, are so vanishingly small that I would believe application of L'Hospital's rule (for dealing with 0 * inifinity limts) would still yield odds of zero, as the odds of nuclear weapons being used as the variable e^t (another assertion), t being a barrier, probably approaches zero far faster than the growth of time t to infinity (ie it is like lim(t-> infinity) [t/e^t] which = 0), thus it is possible that it could happen but never actually should happen.

3. Events like a flipping a coin could occur infinitely often given infinite time (and infinitely many heads could occur) as the law of large numbers states that as you engage in an event more and more times with specific, mutually exclusive outcomes, the percentages of times those events occur becomes closer to the theorhetical percentages (calculated with probability and calculus as it goes to infinity). Thus as you flip a coin infinitely many times, you should end up with ~ 50% heads and ~ 50% tails, and using limit calculus, infinitely many flips (n) divided in half means there are lim(n-> infinity)[n/2] = infinitely many heads and also infinitely many tails, since this calculates each.

In conclusion, I think it is fair to state that A) given real-world scenarios, it is possible but just barely so, to have an event never occur, but the odds are so minute as to be laughable and about 0, B) Events may have nonzero probability and still not occur because the odds are so small they "overpower" the infinintely many attempts via L'Hospital's rule, which is for when we have lim(n-> infinity) [(quantity rapidly approaching zero) * (quantity approaching infinity)], or in other words, that the odds are functionally zero, and C) that even mutually exclusive events could each occur infinitely many times due to how infinity operates (both heads and tails can be flipped infinitely many times when there are infinitely many flips, because the probability is of either result is not zero). Note that this is just how I think the math works out. Maybe that's not what you wanted though.

Essentially, the odds of some events not happening are zero (they will occur), but I think that only applies for events that have even or fixed ratios of the predicted outcomes (3:1, 1:1, etc.) and independent of other variables - the variables in my example (point 2) stack up so damagingly (and would increase over time (in my opinion) as aversion to war seems to go up as a function of time as well) that the odds can stay zero of the example war. Given even odds of multiple different outcomes, each outcome could occur infinitely many times (limit calculus)
 

GofG

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The flaw with assuming an event will happen inevitably because it is not zero makes the assumption that events are created equal and that there is diminishing probability of the event not happening. I argue that certain events, just because they would not necessarily never happen, still may never happen anyway. Also, said events could occur infinite times because a fraction of infinity is infinity (and the law of large numbers) (calculus makes understanding this last tenet easier). Warning - large wall of text - maybe skip to conclusion to avoid numerous details unless you wish to respond to my conclusions, which is in a light blue color.


Talking about a fraction of infinity is meaningless; there are different sized infinities, yes (like the infinity between the cardinal numbers 1 and 2, versus the infinity which is the sum of all positive integers, versus the infinity which is the sum of all numbers, etc), but saying a "fraction of infinity is still infinity" is a meaningless statement.

2. Some events are not as simple as a coin flip, hence the odds happening vary wildly, from it being possible/guaranteed to it never happening. I'll go with the extreme example to make it easy - nuclear war. Yes, the odds of a nuclear war happening are non-zero (a nuke could be launched and more could follow, in a war). But there are certain events that must occur that are NOT a "flip of the coin" so to speak that make the odds so close to zero that it is arguable (through limit calculus) the realistic odds are zero. For instance, there would need to be a situation where the benefits of launching nuclear weapons outweighted (almost surely) inevitable retaliation. I will make some assumptions here that you may take issue with, but given retaliation odds of 100%, and odds near zero that a state will become so totalitarian and vicious that it will either deploy nukes or not accept unconditional masurrender, a rational human being will not take the risk of launching nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons could belong to fundamentally irrational people, but (assumption you can critique) those people chose to engage in acts of terrorism rather than look to work through the state, and their assaults on the state would (another assumption) result in multilateral national backlash, precluding actual dominance by an irrational power. Thus, the barricades to launching nuclear weapons (I've identified 2), are so astronomically difficult to surmount, that the odds of a nuclear weapon being launched, even as time goes to infinity, are so vanishingly small that I would believe application of L'Hospital's rule (for dealing with 0 * inifinity limts) would still yield odds of zero, as the odds of nuclear weapons being used as the variable e^t (another assertion), t being a barrier, probably approaches zero far faster than the growth of time t to infinity (ie it is like lim(t-> infinity) [t/e^t] which = 0), thus it is possible that it could happen but never actually should happen.
You claim that the probability of nuclear weapons being used decreases as time elapsed increases? Your math doesn't support this, I don't think. The probability of nuclear weapons being used does not significantly decrease as time goes on (your assertion that the probability = e^t). The probability might change, but there is no guarantee that it will decrease in some predictable manner. Similarly, I can think of several ways in which nuclear weapons could be used which do not depend on a world power deliberately triggering mutually assured destruction. A rogue power might purchase a nuclear weapon and launch it in a false-flag operation. Ideological extremists might wish to bring about the apocalypse. Sure, most nuclear weapon-possessing nations today seem rational enough to not start a nuclear war, but through only existing mechanisms I can imagine a government of one of these nations being changed into an almost arbitrarily large number of possible forms, many of which would welcome the deliberate genocide of most of the world's inhabitants through nuclear annihilation.

In conclusion, I think it is fair to state that A) given real-world scenarios, it is possible but just barely so, to have an event never occur, but the odds are so minute as to be laughable and about 0, B) Events may have nonzero probability and still not occur because the odds are so small they "overpower" the infinintely many attempts via L'Hospital's rule, which is for when we have lim(n-> infinity) [(quantity rapidly approaching zero) * (quantity approaching infinity)], or in other words, that the odds are functionally zero, and C) that even mutually exclusive events could each occur infinitely many times due to how infinity operates (both heads and tails can be flipped infinitely many times when there are infinitely many flips, because the probability is of either result is not zero). Note that this is just how I think the math works out. Maybe that's not what you wanted though.
This is true of events like "flipping a coin infinitely many times and never getting tails", where we 'lose' the very first time we get a tails. However, this is not isomorphic to the nuclear war scenario.

With the coin-flipping scenario, the probability of no-tails increases as the (predetermined number of) coin flips goes up. (I am not suggesting that, after 5 heads, the sixth flip has a larger chance of getting tails; no, it is still 1:1. I am suggesting that a sequence of 6 flips has a smaller chance of no-tails than a sequence of 5 flips). This means that, as our 'time' variable (representing the number of coin flips) increases, the chance of no-tails decreases, while the chance of tails for any particular coinflip stays the same. This is different from the nuclear war scenario, where the individual chance of starting a nuclear war in any particular moment is miniscule, but rather than the chance decreasing as more time passes, the chance increases. If we were to convert this to a coin-flip problem, nuclear war is NOT the equivalent of getting no-tails with infinite flips. It is actually the equivalent of getting some astronomically large number of consecutive tails. If we say nuclear war happens if we get 50,000 consecutive tails, then the probability increases as we flip more coins.
 

Thor

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GofG said:
*stuff about the nuclear war example and said the mathematics fail*
I'll take the nuclear war example out of it and go back to the mathematics - the example is tertiary to the primary question.

The math: Think of the odds in terms of infinite sums again. If you take the term 1, and add half its value to the sum, and repeat, so that you have the sum from 0 to infinity of 1/n, you end up with a total of 2, but you could never reach this with the fastest computer sped up by a factor of X (X arbitrarily large) for a period of Y units (Y arbitrarily large) because you're always going to have to add more than you'll ever reach. Now do the same thing where the first term is one third or one sixth, and you end up with a sum less than one. If we could apply that probability to an event, however contrived the event is, then an event catalyst could occur infinitely many times and the event we are seeking to find would never occur (so if we had a die that had 6 sides, and every time we rolled it, the side we wanted became less likely by some twist of physics [and it became less likely by half the old odds (so one sixth odds go to one twelfth odds)], then we could roll it infinitely many times and never roll our desired number.) So even though the probability of the event NEVER becomes zero (because you can't divide any number by two to make it zero), it is still entirely possible that the event never happens, which should answer the OP's question.

That said, if the OP meant the odds of an event were fixed (rolling a die), then probability dictates an infinite number of that event will happen, as they had originally guessed.

My reasoning behind the nuclear war example is rather irrelevant (As stated above) but I'll spoiler it here for the interested:
I used the nuclear war example because I tried to take something that can be quantified. I think my argument would hold if the odds of it occurring over the span of time were less than one because if the barriers to a war would grow faster than the odds of a war, the odds over time could/would total less than one, and given that the worst, most likely time had been passed (the one third or one sixth in the infinite time) and time only moves forward, the odds on that day are actually significantly lower, and since the last day wouldn't affect today (or at least 1000 years shouldn't have something that comes back to bite us - 1000 year grudges maybe), then the odds of nuclear war would go down as time went on for any given day, which is what is relevant to those people. Then the cumulative odds have gone up, yes, but the odds of it occurring right then continue to diminish forever, leaving the world safer, not less safe, from nuclear war with each passing unit of time.
 
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GofG

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The thing about the nuclear war example is, while I could see the barriers changing, I don't think they're modelable as a downward curve of any slope; I think they'd be easier to model as a flat average.

The OP was clear; he was talking about undiminishing probabilities. The example he used was a die roll. He asked, is it possible for any specific number to never occur?

The probability of any number occurring approaches 1 as the number of rolls approaches infinity. Indeed, the same happens to any particular sequence.


Fun probability puzzle: you have a die with four Green (G) sides and 2 Red (R) sides. You can bet on a certain sequence and if your sequence shows up, you win $100. The die will be rolled 10 times.

Which sequence would you pick? Why?

GGRRGR
GRRGR
RRGRR
 

Thor

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GofG said:
The thing about the nuclear war example is, while I could see the barriers changing, I don't think they're modelable as a downward curve of any slope; I think they'd be easier to model as a flat average.

The OP was clear; he was talking about undiminishing probabilities. The example he used was a die roll. He asked, is it possible for any specific number to never occur?

The probability of any number occurring approaches 1 as the number of rolls approaches infinity. Indeed, the same happens to any particular sequence.


Fun probability puzzle: you have a die with four Green (G) sides and 2 Red (R) sides. You can bet on a certain sequence and if your sequence shows up, you win $100. The die will be rolled 10 times.

Which sequence would you pick? Why?

GGRRGR
GRRGR
RRGRR
No...the OP example was clear, but his opening paragraphs weren't, and my example fits perfectly - the odds are never zero, but it doesn't occur... they don't state "unchanging odds" [if they had, I'd have stated a while ago that any series would occur given an infinite amount of time]. If we don't speak of diminishing probability, then your answer is complete. The odds are never actually zero (indeed, you can calculate the odds at the nth term using a formula - if the sequence is 1/3 + 1/9 + 1/27 +... it could be calculated at a single point, the nth occurance, as 1/(3^n)) but the event does not occur in some set up of the event ever if you have enough setups of the event and the events viewed as a whole follow the odds properly. If there is not a diminishing probability of the event occurring after an attempt at the event, then I agree that the probability becomes one as the number of times the event catalyst has occurred goes to infinity, so the event will occur.

In response to your puzzle:

The first sequence has odds of [4/6 * 4/6 * 2/6 * 2/6 * 4/6 * 2/6 =] 8/729 odds of occurring as the result of six dice rolls, the second sequence has [4/6 * 2/6 * 2/6 * 4/6 * 2/6 =] 4/243 odds of occurring as a result of 5 dice rolls, and the last sequence has [2/6 * 2/6 * 4/6 * 2/6 *2/6 =] 2/243 odds of occurring as a result of 5 dice rolls, assuming a die that is not fixed. I don't believe the number of times the die is rolled affects the likelihood of a sequence (assuming we roll the dice at least 5 times or at least 6 times for the second sequence) [so rolling the dice 10 times doesn't boost the probability of one of these sequences but not the second sequence], so I'd pick, from a mathematical standpoint, the GRRGR sequence, to maximize my odds of winning the $100.

This was either rather easy, or a trick question, at which point I'd like to hear what the trick I fell for was, because I haven't figured it out yet.
 
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CentaurJF

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You can flip a coin for infinite times, but that doesnt change the probability of it landing on heads or tails. It will always be 50% for heads and tails, but can end up landing on heads for an infinite amount of flips.

for Dependent experiments, it could be much more tricky, but i dont believe in arbitration lol.
 
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