Mid Contest Notifications and Clarifications:
I'll be closing the contest in 1 week on the 21st to allow enough time to judge all the entries and announce the winner by Feb 3rd on my new Radio Show that I'm co-hosting with Bob Dancer, "Gambling With an Edge".
A couple of posters have pointed out that looking for patterns isn't always bad and I wanted to clarify that I agree with that. I'd love to see an entry that offered examples of valid and invalid searches. Here's mine:
Valid Search: Seeing if the time of year influences the occurrences of storms.
Invalid Search: Seeing if the last digit in the day of the month in our Gregorian Calender influences the occurrences of storms.
One is an attempt to find a pattern in an natural event that very well might not be random. The other is a waste of time, since calendar dates are man made overlays, and one can only hope that Hurricane Harry doesn't know it's Tue the 3rd and choose to strike New Orleans right on Mardi Gras.
I also wanted to clarify what I meant by random as it pertains to video poker. We all no that VP machines use pseudo-random number generators. It is a common misconception that this makes them somehow less random. The opposite is closer to the truth. As long as they aren't malfunctioning or miss-programmed, pseudo-random is as random as you can get, and by that we mean, "Equiprobable & Unpredictable". Everything has an equal chance of occurring and you can't predict it.
I would also like to state that I never said you would not find patterns in random events. Again, the opposite is true. You will almost always find patterns in random events, they simply aren't predictors of the future, which would be the point of looking for them if they were.
Cheers all,
~FK