DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - ESPN finds top 2 seeds have had easy draws at USO

**rasiasertew** · 08-16-2011, 05:22 AM

It seems to me they need a larger sampling than ten US Opens, even if it is a little unusual it happened for both the men's and women's draws.

Yes.

The world of random numbers is weird and sometimes looks not so random.
Just like flipping a coin 100 times will give a random streak of heads or tails and it will look not very random at all.
In this experiment, try to replace only 4 of the higher numbers (lets say remove rank 127 player and replace with say 55 and do it for number 1 seed for 4 years), in that case you will see that US Open results will be very similar to that of other tournaments. It really doesn't take much for couple fluke draws to make such a big effect.

Another thing to point at.. in an interview with Andrew Swift where he makes a comparison that the chance of draw happening that way was 1 in about 300,000. Same as flipping heads 18 times in a row on first flip... ok
but flipping same coin with these results

HTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHT or
HHTTHHTTHHTTHHTTHH or

any other single possible combination will ALSO give you 1 in about 262,144 chance ((1/2)^18)
So, his analogy is really bad, imo

08-16-2011, 05:22 AM	#6
rasiasertew Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 561 Senior Member	It seems to me they need a larger sampling than ten US Opens, even if it is a little unusual it happened for both the men's and women's draws. Yes. The world of random numbers is weird and sometimes looks not so random. Just like flipping a coin 100 times will give a random streak of heads or tails and it will look not very random at all. In this experiment, try to replace only 4 of the higher numbers (lets say remove rank 127 player and replace with say 55 and do it for number 1 seed for 4 years), in that case you will see that US Open results will be very similar to that of other tournaments. It really doesn't take much for couple fluke draws to make such a big effect. Another thing to point at.. in an interview with Andrew Swift where he makes a comparison that the chance of draw happening that way was 1 in about 300,000. Same as flipping heads 18 times in a row on first flip... ok but flipping same coin with these results HTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHT or HHTTHHTTHHTTHHTTHH or any other single possible combination will ALSO give you 1 in about 262,144 chance ((1/2)^18) So, his analogy is really bad, imo
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