Miracles, Guaranteed

There was a good article in the Scientific American this month about miracles. Statistically, events with million-to-one odds happen about 295 times a day in America. One example of this effect in action is death premonitions. The article does the math and shows that every year, about 77 out of 250,000,000 people will think of someone who dies less than 5 minutes later. Of course, these few cases are the ones that are written about. The lesson here is that when evaluating a so-called miracle, a good understanding of statistics is important.

Comments

[Praveen]

Graham - It's nice that you manage time efficiently to do different things. It would be good, if you can give us some tips on you manage time efficiently ? - Praveen

[Jim Bender the Elder]

Graham,

Hello. What is important is the causality, not the event. A statistical fluke really isn't a miracle, is it?

We used to think that a computer program that does well on solving some problem, using brute-force methods wasn't particularly artificially intelligent, but one that used a psychologically plausible method might be.

Performance is an issue, but the reason behind the performance (or event) is what matters.

Regards,

Jim Bender (the Elder)

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[Graham]

Hi Jim,

I agree with you. In fact, the point of my post was that things that are often considered miracles are really just statistically unlikely events.

Cheers,
Graham

[robert]

It's nice that you manage time efficiently to do different things

http://membres.lycos.fr/messengermsnfr/