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Quote# 8432

If you took a cup of 20 dice, with letters on them, A B C D, each dice w/ it's own letter, and you wanted it to show up in alphabetic order, A B C D ... and so on, when you shook them and rolled them, the possibility of this occuring is this number and that number is 20 factorial, 1 x 2 x 3 x 4..., that's what the # is, that number multiplied out, is 10 to the 347th power.

[Try it yourself]

sjestus, Rapture Ready 20 Comments [11/29/2005 12:00:00 AM]
Fundie Index: -1
WTF?! || meh
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#5112
TammyFaye

you and your devil factorials, yahweh.

11/29/2005 5:31:48 AM
#5113
ryan

I love this arguement about because fundies use it to say that life and the niverse couldn't have been created by chance. The funny things is if you roll those 20 dice an infinite amount of times, the probability of getting them in Alhabetic order aproaches a hundred percent.

11/29/2005 5:32:11 AM
#5135
Crosis

20! is nowhere near 10^347 (that might be 200!), as Yahweh pointed out. Also, you make a basic mistake with your probability reasoning (assuming you're going where I think you're going here) - you forget the Law of Large Numbers (to wit, a one-in-a-million event is pretty likely if you get a million tries).

11/29/2005 3:01:14 PM
#5147
Bandersnatch

I submitted this one, and my logic to her getting this number was (20!)^20 Which (I think) is the odds of getting said event 20 times in a row.

11/29/2005 5:25:16 PM
#5150
Darth Wang

Not to mention the events are not even sequentially dependent, so it doesn't work that way. And chemical interactions are not random.

11/29/2005 6:07:02 PM
#5188
Frumious B.

People do this all the time to \"prove\" that evolution can't happen. Someone taught me a great way to refute this, if it ever comes up. Usually people do it with coins. Say someone tosses a handful of coins of various kinds and tells you you'll never reproduce how they land by chance. Record all the coins and whether they are H or T. Your turn: toss. Pick up the ones that landed wrong, and toss again. Repeat until you have the original configuration. It's a nice exercise since it's somewhat analogous to how evolution actually works.

11/29/2005 8:35:00 PM
#5238
TDR

I find it soul destroying when fundies attempt to use mathematics. It's almost as bad as the science. I mean - who taught these people? This is not really more advanced than year nine probability here. Did they never go to school?

11/29/2005 11:02:27 PM
#5250
Kimball Khan

Oh man, where to start. First of all, he doesn't specify the number of sides on the dice. Then, he says that each dice has its own letter; so, it would probably be not that hard or improbable to get them in alphabetic order. When he does do math, it is the wrong math and poorly done. The way he phrased it, it would be impossible NOT to achieve the desired outcome. And as you guys have pointed out, the arguement that he trys and utterly fails to make, that the universe is to complex to have happened randomly, is in fact not a good arguement.

11/29/2005 11:29:18 PM
#5286
Bob

A nice refutation of this whole probability is as follows: Go to a store, buy ten packs of playing cards. Unwrap them, bunch them together, and throw them in the air. Notice which cards are face up. Now, what are the odds that those cards would land face up? Are you going to conclude that this arrangement of cards didn't happen, simply because it is so statistically improbable?

11/30/2005 1:08:02 AM
#5295
Rime

Yeah, and the probability of life happening by accident is the same:

as a tornado whipping through a jet factory and having it wind up on the tarmack rrunning and ready for takeoff.

throwing a crystal glass against the wall and having it's shattered pieces join together in a work of art.

So I saw this little clip on http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20051031/clay_geo.html and wonder how accurate those odds are. Slim, yes, but I don't think it's as unlikely as having a tornado building a 747.

11/30/2005 2:09:46 AM
#5336
PenetratingShaftOfTruthAndSemen

Math can be real hard. Please give the guy a little bit of a break.

11/30/2005 7:53:27 AM
#5352
Kimball Khan

>>Math can be real hard. Please give the guy a little bit of a break.<<
Well, if he doesn't understand math, he shouldn't try to use it to prove a point. He is just going to hurt himself.

11/30/2005 9:32:40 AM
#41228
Julian

I did, any every time I did, it spelt out;

SJESTUS IS A STUPID DICK !!!

Every time!

What are the odds of that?

Especially considering I didn't even make a letter K.

6/4/2006 9:40:05 AM
#252165
Robbie

20! = 2432902008176640000. Not even close to 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 I'm afraid.

6/18/2007 8:45:16 PM
#252166
Robbie

Whoops, sorry about that.

6/18/2007 8:45:56 PM
#252176
Dallen

Oh noes Robbie broke the page! ;)

6/18/2007 10:06:30 PM
#252181
Darwin

You FAIL... at genetics.

6/18/2007 10:15:40 PM
#252373
Mr Smith

Well done, you can count. What's your point?

6/19/2007 7:19:21 AM
#252412
Mling/Rebecca

Evolution does not work that way.

It works a little more like this:

Reach into the cup and take out a letter. If it is A, put it down. If not, put it back in and take out another. Repeat until you have A, then move on to B.

Of course, this is not a great metaphore to start from. Something involving lots of puzzle pieces that can fit together in lots of different ways would probably be better.

6/19/2007 9:14:50 AM
#547772


If you shook it 10^347 times then you are sure to get it at least once.

6/18/2008 11:28:03 PM
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