Probability - God actually favours the chancer

international | sci-tech | opinion/analysis Thursday February 23, 2006 05:00 by Seán Ryan

The story continues.....

A look at probability and how logic can be created by it. At a more subtle level, this chapter begins to illustrate and tie together many of the sub-themes that have appeared so far.

Go with your gut feeling. Go with your intuition. How often have you heard this said? How often would you have believed this?

Let's play a game of cards.

A very special game of cards.

With some very special rules.

We each contribute half a million Euro to a pile of cash on the floor.

We shall play a million hands, betting a Euro each hand.

The game goes like this - three cards on the table in front of you, two are knaves and one is a queen, I have mixed them up and you do not know which one is the queen, I do. Your job is to use your intuition to find the lady. You tap the back of one of the cards that you think may be the queen.

I then turn over one of the cards you didn't tap and show it to be a knave.

There are but two cards left, and one of them has to be the queen.

I ask you, 'do you wish to go against your intuition and change your choice?' You must always answer 'no.' As I said its got strange rules. Anyway two cards left and only one is a queen, what are the odds of your choice being correct?

Money goes into a pocket.

After the millionth hand, it will dawn on you, that I will have very close to, double the money you have. (Check this seemingly odds defying stunt yourself, you don't need to do it a million times either to see the statistics at work, I only said a million because I forgot myself, I spotted an opportunity and became greedy).

You see, intuition is pure chance, and fate can be governed by the observation and subsequent manipulation of probability, to get into the best position on one's multi dimensional picture of self, intuition combined with purpose and perspective is a very powerful tool. This tool is sometimes referred to as instinct.

Had I allowed you the option to actually change your mind and you did so half a million times we would have had the same or nearly the same amount of money each at the end of the game.

Like any good trickster I'm loath to explain how I accomplished my illusion, but for the sake of the greater good I shall.

Three cards.

You pick one; your chances are one in three.

The other two cards are mine; I have a two in three chance of having the queen.

When I show you, one of my cards isn't the queen, the odds remain two out of three that I still have the queen, you see at all times at least one of my cards has to be a knave.

Your choice is a one in three choice, where as the remaining card you didn't choose has a two in three possibility of being the queen.

To make it more obvious still; imagine using the full deck of cards. You pick one of the fifty-two and hope it is the queen of hearts. You have one card I have fifty-one. I slowly turn over fifty of my cards and show none of them to be the queen of hearts. I have one card and you have one card. Would you like to lay a bet this time? How about double or quits?

To know the nature of the probability itself is to be able to influence an outcome. Similar, in a fashion to an observation disturbing an electron.

Look at chess. This is a game of chance. If you don't believe me look at it this way, if it were not, the outcome of every game could and would, be a foregone conclusion, including every move made.

Yet if one looks at a chessboard and pieces, we see each is limited by a very finite set of possibilities. For instance white when taking its first move has only twenty possible moves and black must respond from a range of only twenty moves. Of course the possibilities begin to mount from here and one can see that it is the complexity of the possibilities that prevents one from predicting the outcome of the game. It is the ability to focus on and act on these complexities of possibilities that allows one to develop a winning strategy. A chess player who only responds to the complexities and possibilities offered by his opponent should just tip his king over and save the slaughter of his other pieces.

Intelligence coupled with intent and strategy can often tip the balance of chance.

Imagine generating a massive string of numbers composing of ones and zeroes by tossing a coin to decide the value of each digit.

If I could keep tossing coins for eternity I would have an infinitely long string with infinite probability, yet each toss of the coin is predictable one out of two times. How can it be, that we can derive infinite probability, from something that seems so balanced or symmetrical?

I can comprehend the overall structure in that I know that should I observe any particular digit within the sequence, the odds are 50:50 that I will be able to pre-guess its value. I cannot observe the whole structure at once though because it is too large.

I must cut the string into smaller strings, or even sub-strings, if you will, to understand and be able to digest it.

Looking at each sub-string, and observing the sequences I see my theory as to being a 50:50 theory, take a serious beating in a lot of these sub-strings.

Some of them are fine, and are even mixtures, others however are anything but. Vast lines of ones shall be observed with few if any zeros dotted randomly through the line, it is even possible that some sub-strings appear with only ones irregardless as to how long you cut each sub-string. The same properties can be seen to occur with zeros too.

If one could tell just by the viewing of a sub-string or collection of them, where we were on the original string we calculated, we could look up the sheet where we did our calculations and announce the universe to be absolutely predictable. For instance say your sub-string was twenty digits long. Let's say you had two sub-strings, one was all zeros, and the other was all ones. You find a place on the big picture where these two sub-strings sit side by side. You believe you have mapped the whole string. Wrong. These 20 digit sub-strings would also fit into many pairs of sub-string who contained more than twenty characters. It is possible though, to if dealing with large enough sub-strings, to get a good idea of what the immediate future holds.

However our original string is so vast that we have not yet reached a depth of complexity to observe enough sub-strings to be able to fit and superimpose them definitively over, our near absolute string.

All is not lost, because in this sea of chaos we have spotted patterns, and patterns are relative, and behave relatively similar to the way we can predict them to behave.

Lets us call the sub-strings composing of nearly all ones a phenomena. The shorter the sub-string the more prevalent they become.

Let us call all other conditions natural.

Being phenomena, when it happens I will notice it.

The next time it happens I'll recognise it sooner than before, of course sometimes I'll be wrong, so what, life is not an exact science. The shorter sub-string phenomena are harder to spot than the long sub-string phenomena because they are over or close to it by the time you spot them. But I will say this. The better I understand the initial phenomena the better my chances of being right the next time I announce a phenomena to be occurring.

Logic and predictability seem to go hand in hand, the more predictable the event the more logical its occurance seems. It seems that logic is the tool we debate with but it is our hearts that we reason with.

Passion is not the product of logic, but can be a slave to it. Some years ago I was in Canada and heard this TV evangelist tell his flock not to be swayed by even arguments of logic. I was disgusted that somebody would preach this until I thought about it. I realised that this guy was not really saying anything bad as such as this is how man functions at his core.

Why does John love Mary?

Scientists say John's brain floods with endorphins and loads of other lovely chemicals every time John sees or thinks of Mary. They don't say whether this is a consequence or a cause.

Religion says it is because God has created John a mate.

Society says the same but adds that the offspring are property of the state.

John says it's because of the way she flicks her hair, her beguiling smile or the way she makes him feel complete.

Love is many things and takes many forms, none of them are logical.

These two little sub-strings join and the universe becomes clearer.

Chance is the core ingredient in love.

If Mary didn't hate the saliva of others in her food, John would never have seen her come back to complain about her burger and would never have met her.

If Mary did not resonate passionately to Beethoven the same way John did, he would not have been able to share this particular passion with her or experience some of her depth.

If Mary did not have the ability to be able to guess his sometimes disguised intentions he would not have felt that she made him feel so complete, by this I mean that she can guess what he wants to tell her before he tells her or despite telling her something else, like telling her she looked fabulous in the black dress but meaning she looked a lot better out of it.

Silence is never uncomfortable between them.

Logic dies and confusion reigns, happy is the little blind and foolish God of love.

However.

Man being a formal creature soon tries to impose logic on the illogical. Yes we try to impose logical routines in our relationships.
Mary's guffawing snorting laugh becomes not so cute as bloody embarrassing. Mary's laugh becomes appropriate only at certain times and places. Mary still expects the passion that was present at the start, even though John in his heart knows she no longer feels the exact same way either.

Of course it's not all Mary's fault. Mary finds the fact that John can scratch his head and itch his arse both at the same time and in public very disturbing and embarrassing, even though she used to love stuff that made him stand out from the crowd, also his ability to consume his food with passion is no longer funny or cute but is now disgusting or pig like.

Yup the moment either partner starts thinking in terms of I rather than we, the relationship is in trouble.

The pair will sort it out or go their separate ways.

Time to try to find another lady, lay your bets! Have another go, should the relationship fail.

If the couple stay together it will be because it is logical or supposedly logical to do so. Love is not only illogical it is also deeply ironic.

Is this not the way with mans love for his country. When the passion becomes routine? The real problem here is one cannot leave this lady but must reach compromise with her. Unfortunately those who speak on her behalf have also added deafness to the description of the foolish, blind God of love. It is therefore he who must make all the compromise, he continues to love her with all his heart but at some primal level begins to resent her too.

This is a love that will sustain neither party. Resentment is a corrupter and destroyer of love. Resentment causes love to decrease not to grow.

She suffers also; the non-equality of the relationship stops her from feeling that he is what makes her complete and it prevents him from actually being it.

If only people would realise that government is an arranged marriage between our country and us and that we all decide the bride for each other. Why not choose for me, as you would pray I would choose for you?