On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 7:37 PM, <gottl...@nyu.edu> wrote: > On Sat, Jun 28 2014, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: > >> That doesn't matter. Take a non-negative integer N; if you flip a coin >> an infinite number of times, then the probability of the coin landing >> on the same face N times in a row is 1. > > This is certainly true. > >> This means that it is *guaranteed* to happen > > That is not as clear.
Let me be more precise (and please correct me if I'm wrong): It is guaranteed to happen at some point in the infinite sequence of random flip coins, but we cannot know when it will happen, only that it will happen. That's the way I got it when I took my probability courses, admittedly many years ago. In any way, even if I'm wrong and it is not guaranteed, the main point remains true: the probability of getting a large sequence of the same number from a RNG is 1 for every true random RNG, and therefore seeing a large sequence of the same number form a RNG doesn't (technically) means that it is broken. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Profesor de asignatura, Facultad de Ciencias Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México