sketerpot comments on Shut Up And Guess - Less Wrong

79 Post author: Yvain 21 July 2009 04:04AM

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Comment author: sketerpot 21 July 2009 07:13:11PM 1 point [-]

Guessing, if you have no idea which way to guess is more likely, will not have quite the same result as leaving questions blank. Leaving questions blank will add 0 to your score, while guessing will add a mostly-Gaussian random variable with a mean of 0. The math of this is kind of fun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk

And of course, the central limit theorem is colossally important:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

Comment author: ciphergoth 25 July 2009 10:41:39AM 0 points [-]

No need to invoke that here - directly calculating the probabilities using the binomial distribution is perfectly practical in this instance.