Probability

I'm currently taking a statistics class at school right now, and we're studying probability.

Probability is, of course, essentially how likely something is to happen. It's used a lot in games, as well as real life.

The other day, I went to McD's to get some food and try my hand at their Monopoly game. I got a 10-piece nugget meal, large sized, but with a medium drink. That maximizes the number of game pieces in one meal: 2 on the nuggets, 2 on the medium drink (I checked with an employee, and they said that the large didn't have game pieces, which is why I adjusted my drink's size), and 4 on the large fries. That's 8 game pieces. The advertised odds are that about 1 in 4 are winners. That means that I should win... twice, right?

No. Not one was a winner. Now, I know that since there's a limited number of game pieces, that if I got all of them, the odds would hold out.

That's not necessarily so with infinite. If you flip a coin, there's a 50/50 chance that you'll get a tails. Mathematically, if you flip that coin infinite times, half of those will be tails. However, you could theoretically flip that coin infinite times and get all heads. Or all tails.

Skills, spells, etc. in games all use probability. Whether it hits, whether it hits critically, if the secondary effect happens. You could have a spell that hits 99% of the time, mathematically, but not have it hit at all.

There. I related it. Honestly, though, I just had a bit of writer's blogger's block. But I've been posting every day since I started, and I didn't want to skip a day. So there.