RE: Message for Longwait (off-topic)22 Mar 2020 08:59
Yes, Double, those 'coincidences'!
I remember reading once that Anthony Hopkins was due to star in a film which, due to AIM-induced premature dementia, I now for the first time cannot identify, but unfortunately, the novel on which it was based was out of print.
One day, while waiting for a train on the London underground, he spotted a copy of it, lying on a seat on the platform, which someone had inadvertently and kindly left there for him.
I once came across a book about roulette, with details of a system with which the author - a well-known television personality - claimed he had consistently won large sums of money, been treated royally by the casino, and - unlike our friend with the social security chips - actually got to keep his winnings.
The system seemed implausible because it required a number to have come up three times in 30 spins, BEFORE betting on it (for nine successive spins), which seems counter-intuitive, since you would think the chances of it coming up again would be reduced rather than increased.
I heard many years ago that in spite of what most people seem to think, the correct view, mathematically-speaking, is that any number that has just come up has the same chance of coming up on the next spin as any other number. I never asked my mathematics lecturers at university whether they shared this view, but I don't.
I tried testing the system on a baby roulette wheel. At first, it worked spectacularly well: it was as if the system were magical.
I then noticed a bias in the wheel and after trying a bigger wheel with a different bias, I used a number-crunching toy instead.
The upshot was that in the long run, the system failed miserably, doing worse than chance, which is what my intuition had told me in the first place.
I once went to a casino and spent hours recording the numbers that came up.
Three times, the system indicated a 'play'.
I held myself back each time, even though I had bought chips.
Each time, the system failed.
You may recall my post about an Irish ex-RAF pilot who took a team to Macau to test roulette systems and won at Baccarat , a game he didn't even know how to play, by doing the opposite of what a player who was losing consistently did.
His book, which I bought in the same shop as the first, didn't have the multi-page sequence of thousands of spins inside the back sleeve. I was later offered a copy of the book plus the sequence for a princely sum, which I declined.
My special interest was in long sequences.
I did notice a phenomenon when I used the number cruncher: when a number had not come up for a very long time, say 80 spins or more, it would eventually come up several times in a short period.
This is actually what I would expect, because assuming no bias, the long-term average must prevail.
It was uncanny how this happened every time, but of course one could not know when exactly it would happen.
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