comment on

>>
You can't tell from a single test if a stretch of 500 heads followed by 500 tails is non-random: you'd have to permute or at the very least replicate
<<

The 500H,500T sequence would be extremely good evidence of a non-random generation. By my reckoning, in any one trial of 500 tosses, you have about 1 chance in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (== 10**50) of throwing all heads or all tails.

The odds of throwing the sequence are therefore about 1 in 10**100 - a googol. If that is not a good enough result, how would replicating the result help? You just change the odds to 1 in 10**200.

In reply to Re: Re: Testing for randomness by sandfly
in thread Testing for randomness by DrHyde

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
	PerlMonks