Quote from: dooglus on December 15, 2015, 02:54:30 AM

I'd be interested to see your working. How did you get that probability?

Considering mining as a process in which events occur continuously and independently at a constant average rate, I found this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution and used it as a reference. It gave me ready to use formulas for the probability distribution that describes the time between events in such a process. The cumulative distribution function 1 - e^-λx is the probability of encountering an interval shorter than x, where

λ = 1/β is the rate, and
β = 10 minutes, i.e. the mean time between events.

The likelihood of an interval longer than x is then e^-x/β. For instance, intervals longer than 5 times the mean time happen with the probability of e^-5.