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Paul the Octopus


gillsminnow

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Just out of interest... are there any scientific approaches to find out how Paul decides for a flag? Is it just random or has it maybe something to do with the colours? My theory was that he goes for the colour red in a flag, thus he decided to go for Germany (who incidentally won their matches then) unless the flag of the other country (Serbia, Spain) has the colour higher located on the flag. Err.. forgot about England. Maybe he is atheist and doesn't like crosses?

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Just out of interest... are there any scientific approaches to find out how Paul decides for a flag? Is it just random or has it maybe something to do with the colours? My theory was that he goes for the colour red in a flag, thus he decided to go for Germany (who incidentally won their matches then) unless the flag of the other country (Serbia, Spain) has the colour higher located on the flag. Err.. forgot about England. Maybe he is atheist and doesn't like crosses?

You're not really doubting the power of the octopus, are you? :mad:

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Probability theory completely passed you by, didn't it?

You say it like it's not a specialist subject.

I just don't understand the format of 1,56%. What the hell does that mean?!? When you said 'the odds of getting 6 in a row correct are ...' I was expecting a fraction, not a formula.

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Some crazy Euros use , instead of .

Oh I get it. He means 1.56%. I googled that as a fraction to 39/25 which still doesn't make sense to me as odds as I would have thought they would be way bigger than that.

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I googled that as a fraction to 39/25 which still doesn't make sense to me as odds as I would have thought they would be way bigger than that.

Ah, I see now that the use of the word 'odds' was likely misleading as you seem to be thinking of betting odds which wasn't what I meant. 'Chance' would have worked better, I suppose. If you have a bag with one red marble and one black one, and you pick one out of the bag 6 times, there's a 1.56% chance you pick 6 red ones in a row. This is basically the same thing.

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Oh I get it. He means 1.56%. I googled that as a fraction to 39/25 which still doesn't make sense to me as odds as I would have thought they would be way bigger than that.

I would love to know how you got this :D

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Ah, I see now that the use of the word 'odds' was likely misleading as you seem to be thinking of betting odds which wasn't what I meant. 'Chance' would have worked better, I suppose. If you have a bag with one red marble and one black one, and you pick one out of the bag 6 times, there's a 1.56% chance you pick 6 red ones in a row. This is basically the same thing.

Gotcha :thup:

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Yeah, that's using the value 156 not 1.56.

Nice try though.

Thank you. Absolutely zero effort went into it beside typing a sentence into google. What is 1.56% as a fraction then. Is it simply 100/1.56?

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Is that actual fact or just a made up figure?

He gets 2 options each time so getting it correct 6 times in a row could always happen to a "regular person"

Flip a coin and see how many times you get 6 heads in a row if you want to test the theory. Figure is correct, although there may be other reasons why the octopus is selecting the boxes as he is.

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Flip a coin and see how many times you get 6 heads in a row if you want to test the theory. Figure is correct, although there may be other reasons why the octopus is selecting the boxes as he is.

Fair enough then, I just don't believe in the ability to be pyschic though. Especially a octopus, if this octopus is physic though (for whatever reason) then they should do something like putting out the boxes of the bundesliga teams and get Paul to predict the winner of the bundesliga.

If he got that correct then I may start to believe in this octopus' ability

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The chance of him getting all 6 right is not 0.156, because for the first 3 games there could've been a draw, and he had no option of picking a draw, had it been he'd have got one wrong (through no fault of his own), so it's impossible to quantify the odds of him being correct all the way through, because we don't know the real odds for a draw on these games (in a two way tie the odds of the result are irrelevant because you can have the result given, and the odds of him selecting that box are 0.5, then again I suppose we can take the first 3 games as given results and with that knowledge he has a 50/50 chance of getting it right, so in hindsight his odds were 0.0156, but prior to the tournament those would not have been his odds), if we were to assume that there's a 0.33 chance of a draw, then produces a chance of 0.0045, which is pretty slim. But I bet there loads of other animals out there who made predictions and were discarded after getting one wrong, that we'll never hear about.

Anyway he's only got the Germany games right, he's not done the others, with Germany not being in the final I predict he'll get this one wrong.

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Just out of interest... are there any scientific approaches to find out how Paul decides for a flag? Is it just random or has it maybe something to do with the colours? My theory was that he goes for the colour red in a flag, thus he decided to go for Germany (who incidentally won their matches then) unless the flag of the other country (Serbia, Spain) has the colour higher located on the flag. Err.. forgot about England. Maybe he is atheist and doesn't like crosses?

he chose Germany for Euro 08 and chose Spain this time round. So colour seems to be irrelevant.

Ah, I see now that the use of the word 'odds' was likely misleading as you seem to be thinking of betting odds which wasn't what I meant. 'Chance' would have worked better, I suppose. If you have a bag with one red marble and one black one, and you pick one out of the bag 6 times, there's a 1.56% chance you pick 6 red ones in a row. This is basically the same thing.

odds are percentages. so working out the likely percentage of an event is a thought in the starting point of odds. but then they start to get skewed by betting patterns.

Anyway he's only got the Germany games right, he's not done the others, with Germany not being in the final I predict he'll get this one wrong.

Has he actually predicted other games or has he always been doing German games?

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The chance of him getting all 6 right is not 0.156, because for the first 3 games there could've been a draw, and he had no option of picking a draw, had it been he'd have got one wrong (through no fault of his own), so it's impossible to quantify the odds of him being correct all the way through, because we don't know the real odds for a draw on these games (in a two way tie the odds of the result are irrelevant because you can have the result given, and the odds of him selecting that box are 0.5, then again I suppose we can take the first 3 games as given results and with that knowledge he has a 50/50 chance of getting it right, so in hindsight his odds were 0.0156, but prior to the tournament those would not have been his odds), if we were to assume that there's a 0.33 chance of a draw, then produces a chance of 0.0045, which is pretty slim. But I bet there loads of other animals out there who made predictions and were discarded after getting one wrong, that we'll never hear about.

Anyway he's only got the Germany games right, he's not done the others, with Germany not being in the final I predict he'll get this one wrong.

Actually, it's 0.0046 :D [/pedant mode]

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