Interesting, how can one explain the occurrence of an event with a probability of 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 percent? In the States lives Joan R. Ginther, who has won the Texas lottery four times in a row. Each jackpot there has a likelihood of about 1 in 25 million. If there were so many jackpot winners that among them there was a chance for someone to win twice in a row, and there were so many of those that there was a probability of finding someone winning thrice, and enough of those to find someone winning four times, then I would understand. But there aren’t that many jackpot-winners. How can one explain the occurrence of such events from the perspective of probability theory?
The simplest explanation is that the assessment should not be made after the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of the event. In this case, it simply happened, and that’s that. Honestly, I find such an explanation hardly satisfactory 🙂 But on the other hand, the probability of finding a needle in a haystack is, say, 1:1,000,000, but someone saw the needle and picked it up. Or, say, flipping a coin 20 times in a row – an event with the same probability. The difficulty was in predicting, not in randomly hitting a rare event. Joan couldn’t predict the outcome, but she managed to hit a rare event. I think she simply bought a lot of lottery tickets. But still, it all seems strange.
The second – we are mistaken in thinking outcomes are independent.
Then there is the theory of the many-worlds quantum interpretation, where the probability of anything is 100%. You just have to choose the right universe.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 