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lovichlast Tuesday at 12:24 AM3 repliesview on HN

> It won't happen though. 0.00000000% chance it happens even once in a trillion attempts.

It has the same odds as any other specific configuration of randomly assigned dots. The overly active human pattern matching behavior is the only reason it would be treated as special.


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coldtealast Tuesday at 1:30 AM

>It has the same odds as any other specific configuration of randomly assigned dots

Which doesn't change anything in practice, since it having "the same odds as any other specific configuration" ignores the fact that more scattered configurations are still far more numerous than it (or even from ones with more visual order in general) taken all together.

>The overly active human pattern matching behavior is the only reason it would be treated as special.

Nope, it's also the fact that it is ONE configuration, whereas all the rest are much much larger number. That's enough to make this specific configuration ultra rare in comparison (since we don't compare it to each other but to all others put together).

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FartinMowlerlast Tuesday at 2:57 AM

Lol, reminds me of a story: at his workplace my brother was invited to join a lottery ticket pool where each got to pick the numbers for a ticket. The numbers he picked were 1-2-3-4-5-6. Although the others, mostly fellow engineers, reluctantly agreed his numbers were as likely as the others, after a couple of weeks they neglected to invite him again.

Dylan16807last Tuesday at 1:13 AM

Entropy says it's special. If you have a million dots and 10,000 coordinates, you have 10,000 ways for all the dots to land in the same coordinate, and a zillion kavillion stupillion ways to have somewhere near 100 dots in each coordinate.

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