Michael Phelan
speaker
34 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2011
last heard Sep 2011
Michael Phelan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I asked him how it worked.
There are a certain number of ways that you can draw seven tiles out of a bag.
And basically what the program does is it calculates the different ways that you can draw seven tiles and how many of them form a particular word.
For example, there are 16 billion different ways to choose seven tiles out of 100.
And there are 100 tiles in a Scrabble bag, are there?
Yeah, there are 100 tiles in the square eyeball bag, and it makes it a little tricky to calculate because I'm also counting the two blanks, where a blank can be used as any letter.
What are the chances of drawing the word janitor?
So the chances are about 1 out of 20,000.
Okay, and to draw it twice in a row?
It's that number squared, so it's about 1 in 500 million.
Okay, that's pretty unlikely.
Yeah, very unlikely.
And that's one way of looking at it.
You know, of course, if you were to predict in advance, I want to draw janitor twice in a row, and then you do it, of course, that's extremely improbable.
But what happened wasn't exactly that.
These occurrences happened about 40 years apart, and he said that he'd played many games of Scrabble in the interim, and I just would estimate maybe if he'd played 25 games of Scrabble per year over 40 years, maybe he's played 1,000 games more.
And so we may want to consider what would be the probability of drawing janitor twice in any two of those 1,000 games.
You've done that particular calculation?
The chances of drawing it twice in 1,000 games are about 1 in 400.
Yeah, we're starting to get into the realm of from the extremely improbable into the sort of somewhat improbable.
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