POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Weekly calibration : Re: Weekly calibration Server Time
6 Sep 2024 07:15:05 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Weekly calibration  
From: scott
Date: 22 Apr 2009 06:07:58
Message: <49eeec7e$1@news.povray.org>
> Nope. Probability theory gives zero.

OK, well I will have to bow down to your superior maths knowledge over mine. 
I was just going by what I had read about 1/infinity not being strictly 
speaking zero (only under certain circumstances) and the fact that the 
infinite series seems to be defined as always equal to 1 in mathematics.  I 
was not aware of anything specific in probability theory that defined the 
probability of choosing 1 item from an infinite number as zero.  Writing the 
probability as 1/infinity rather than zero explained the "never gets chosen" 
paradox you mentioned quite nicely, but oh well...

>> Of course you can discuss how this relates to reality, but I'd rather
>> not get involved in that one, it could an infinitely long time :-)
>
> But that *is* what Warp and I are complaining about.

You should first discuss if there is enough time for an infinite number of 
finite length events to ever happen :-)  Personally I think you have to 
treat this a strictly theoretical concept, otherwise you run into all sorts 
of other technicalities about whether it can actually happen.


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