Re: [asa] Re: Ages of the patriarchs

Oops! correction on the math in my post: the 1/e was the probability
of *failure*, not success. So (1 - 1/e) or ~63% chance is what you
would have of finding a desired sequence after n attempts, each having
1/n probability of success, with n being very large. You would only
need to do about 5n trials to raise your odds to better than 99%.
Bring on Shakespeare's works, and the billion monkey typists, but
they'll have to go at it for far longer than the universe is thought to
exist.

--merv

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Received on Fri Feb 23 00:07:28 2007