Reply #6: Good thought but not so good math [View All]

[Psephos]

Your calculation pinpoints only how long, on average, it would take for the likelihood of the event to approach certainty, when looking at the entire aggregate of trials. In other words, one might expect the event to have happened after running that many trials. However, you wouldn't know whether it would be on the third run or the fifty thousand one hundred and third run. Each run would have equal probability of being the "one."

Read some of John Allen Paulos' books (Innumeracy is one of the best) for entertaining and insightful debunking of mathematical misconceptions common in politics and general life.