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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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Science Memes
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Having two possible outcomes does not mean it's a 50:50 chance.
"So if I aim the arrow at the 1cm square from 100m away and shoot, I either hit it or I don't. So basically I have a 50% chance of hitting it."
My wife, father-in-law and I were playing a board game with my brother-in-law. In this game, we were playing as detectives who have to try to find his character, but each turn he could move in secret in one of several directions. We were a few turns in at one point and he could have been in any of dozens of places at this point. We drove him nuts by saying "he's either in this spot or he's not, it's a 50-50 chance." He kept arguing "I could be in a ton of places! It's not a 50-50 chance!" But we just kept pretending we didn't understand and arguing that there were only two possibilities, he's there or he's not, so it was clearly a 50-50 chance. He got quite angry.
Scotland Yard or Letters from Whitechapel?
I love Scotland Yard. We got it for a friend who loves detective stories. Then discovered that it’s a public transit simulator which is even better.
Honestly, Letters From Whitechapel is a better design of the same concept.
For detective story games, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is amazing.
And for public transit games, Bus is the way to go (probably)
Lol Sherlock Holmes consulting detective is probably fun as a single player game, but we played it as a party game (cause it said you could do that) and the result is just chaos.
We got on what we were pretty sure was the right track and got into some rabbit holes, brought it back to Sherlock and he basically told us to fuck off and die and we earned negative points. I think we got one part of one of his answers and didn't even visit most of the places that would have given us at least a few answers.
Great for a laugh though.
I would say it should be fine as a solo game if you’re into that, but better as a 2-3 player game to have someone to discuss and bounce ideas against.
I can imagine that as a party game it would be chaotic for sure!
Definitely needs the right group, and I think you can’t take the scoring too seriously, especially playing in larger groups. Pretty sure I also have never had a positive score even in a smaller group.
Yeah that's why I say it's good for a laugh. If a game is nearly impossible to get a decent score in, it can't been taking itself too seriously. You're meant to sit back and watch the master Sherlock Holmes do his thing and nail the mystery. Often it's fun and you get some "oh yeah" moments where he points out a detail that makes a lot of clues click, but sometimes the leaps in logic are just unhinged. Also there was another mystery I remember distinctly where in order to get the correct line, you had to have some random bit of trivia knowledge about Sherlock-era English style cause it was based on someone's hat.
Now that I write this, I bet there's a lot of fun bits for people who have read all of the Sherlock books and "get" the logic of that world.
We bought it at goodwill on a whim knowing nothing about it. Good to know about your other suggestions. Thanks!
Public transit simulator! No way
Letters from Whitechapel
Letters from Whitechapel?
Either that or you buried the lede by failing to mention something rather significant about the hidden character, and you were playing Fury of Dracula. Or my boardgamegeek-fu isn't as strong as I hoped.
Yeah it was Letters from Whitechapel.
you know, if you watched for tells, that could tilt the probabilities... and I bet with the frustration... he was flashing tells all over the place...
Either I become president, or I don't.
Therefore, the odds of me becoming president is 50%
Brb committing 34 felonies.
You've already failed.
You have to commit hundreds of felonies. In broad daylight. And brag about it.
Threaten witnesses. Delay everything.
And only be convicted of 34.
Then not get sentenced.
Very weird fun fact about arrows/darts and statistics, theres 0% chance of hitting an exact bullseye. You can hit it its possible to throw a perfect bullseye. It just has a probability of zero when mathematically analyzed due to being an infinitesimally small point. Sound like I'm making shit up? Here's the sauce
How can an outcome both be entirely possible and have 0% probability?
Q.E.D
Key word here is "infinitesimally." Of course if you're calculating the odds of hitting something infinitesimally small you're going to get 0. That's just the nature of infinities. It is impossible to hit an infinitesimally small point, but that's not what a human considers to be a "perfect bullseye." There's no paradox here.
Another lesson I the importance of significant digits, a concept I've had to remind many a young (and sometimes an old) engineer about. An interesting idea along similar lines is that 2 + 2 can equal 5 for significantly large values of 2.
What do you mean by significantly large
Depending on how you're rounding, I assume. Standard rounding to whole digits states that 2.4 will round to 2 but 4.8 will round to 5. So 2.4+2.4=4.8 can be reasonably simplified to 2+2=5.
This is part of why it's important to know what your significant digits are, because in this case the tenths digit is a bit load bearing. But, as an example, 2.43 the 3 in the hundredths digit has no bearing on our result and can be rounded or truncated.
Also the circumference of the dart tip is not infinitesimally small, so theres a definite chance of it overlapping the 'perfect bullseye' by hitting any number of nearby points.
Oh. That's what they mean. That's dumb lol.
You must not be playing on a soft tip board.
On the other hand: Half of my lottery tickets were jackpots. I never played and have (1/2 * 0 = ) 0 jackpots.
The thing with that is that it's actually a useful generalization to make in a lot of scenarios.
If you know nothing about the distinction between two possible outcomes, treating them as equally likely is a helpful tool to continue with the back of the envelope guess. Knowing this path needs 5 coin tosses to go right and this one needs 10 is helpful to approximate which is better.
Your example is obviously outside the realm where you have zero information, so uniform distribution is no longer the reasonable default. But the idea is from a reasonable technique, taken to extremes by someone who doesn't fully get it.