The probability is about 0.0000000000174 (10 zeros after the decimal point). I find this "statistically stunning" - the author of the article says otherwise. Clearly he meant to say "If you flip it 100 times...", then 47 heads would not be statistically stunning, as opposed to 470,000 heads after a million tosses. On the other hand, it is not too late to let Bob proofread Cathy's posts on this thread.
Bob did just proof read my stuff. He thinks it might be right in theory but wrong in practice. If there is only a 50/50 chance of living and dying, he said we would have run out of people already. But chance exists as an all or none thing. Live or die. Win or lose. On or off. 50/50 Probability is a funny thing. You can have a 10% probability of survival and still be living 7 years later. Bob did that with cancer. You can have a 90% probability of winning, but still lose. What we do every day on the market. Just thinking.
Well Gordon....eat those vitamins, exercise and make plenty of money so you can afford to have those wrinkles removed!
Cathy, You could also expand the time frame and suddenly the problem makes no sense. If you say that we have a 50/50 chance of living each day, then I could equally say we have a 50/50 chance of living for a millennia (there is only two states, right?). So obviously something is wrong with that picture. Or, you could say 50/50 for each Plank division in time that we live. At that rate, the calculus would suggest that we should have all died in an unmeasurable amount of time after we were born (instantly).
Aphie.... I was trying to equate live/die with win/lose......which works with words but not with math. I keep reading I have a 50/50 chance of making money on any single trade. But if I look at my trades for a week.....it is more like an 80% probability I will make money by looking at the win/loss ratio. I have read and re-read the book Fooled By Randomness and am really intrigued by this. But lack the math skills to put it in practical terms. Alas, I was an English major. But what you just wrote about "living for millennia" against "dying instantly" made me realize that there is a huge variable in an "either/or" statement that is not taken into account. And I watch a lot of science and history channels. So the living on a thin crust on a ball of lava and being pelted by meteorites really has me intrigued as to how fragile our being alive really is. It is amazing we are alive at all when you think about it. So how would I write all this in a mathmatical expression? I am not sure there is a way. But of course I am "math deprived" This is part of my search for the "holy grail" of trading. I want to remove the "me" from it and still be trading well by a program. Bob does well at Blackjack, but can't really explain why to me. I do well on the Market, and can't explain why to him.