Quote from: youfunnypeople on Today at 12:46:21 PM

So next time when someone tells you that he will take the prize with >99% probability, laugh Cheesy

Except of course that he did take the prize, twice.

Except of course that a 1% chance, or even a 0.5% or 0.25% chance, may seem small to you, given how we might normally think of percentages, but absolutely can be statistically significant when calculating probabilities (depending on the data at hand, etc).

Except of course that in this specific case the solution was very close to the start of the search range, something that's only happened twice before, and on very low-numbered puzzles (#4 and #10) where the search ranges were very, very small... So, yeah, there was a pretty small chance this would happen, but it happened... Because, statistically speaking or not, shit happens... And I don't see the need to point and laugh at someone over it, or to say that their maths are wrong, when they very obviously and openly accounted for exactly this possibility...

Bram just got unlucky this time, in exactly the same way that I and others are just hoping to get lucky...

In fact, someone out there did seemingly get lucky... Either they were running a simple sequential search and hit the jackpot on a high-numbered puzzle that happened to have a solution that was super-early in the range, without the need for slicing the range into randomly-chosen blocks or matching on prefixes (etc etc), or they randomly hit the exact right solution by pure chance... If anything, while I feel bad for Bram and especially for the solver who clearly didn't know about the bots situation, I also feel better about my belief that "luck" can still play a part in solving these puzzles, even at these higher numbers / larger ranges...

Shit happens, yes, and I, for one, am going to continue trying my best to end-up on the right side of that equation Cheesy

Get Lucky - Daft Punk

May the odds be ever in your favor!