On Jun 16, 2015 4:58 PM, "Ian Kelly" <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 4:30 PM, <sohcahto...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Tuesday, June 16, 2015 at 3:01:06 PM UTC-7, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote: > >> This should give you pause: In real mathematics, events with zero > >> probability can occur. > > > > Nobody will disagree with that. The probability of me winning the lottery is zero if I don't buy a ticket. > > I believe he's actually referring to this: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely > > Not that this has anything to do with the probabilities under > discussion in this thread.
Actually, I take that back. The coin flip example in the Wikipedia article is exactly what we've been discussing, taken to the ultimate extreme of an infinitely long sequence. Unfortunately for Thomas, the article does not agree with his position, describing the event of never flipping a tail in such an infinite sequence as "almost never". If, as Thomas maintains, the probability of this event does not decrease as the length of the sequence increases, then the probability for the infinite sequence would have to be non-zero since the probability for any finite sequence is non-zero.
-- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
