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benelliott comments on Anticipating critical transitions - Less Wrong
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So, I wrote a similar program to Phil and got similar averages, here's a sample of 5 taken while I write this comment
8.2 6.9 7.7 8.0 7.1
These look pretty similar to the numbers he's getting. Like Phil, I also get occasional results that deviate far from the mean, much more than you'd expect to happen with and approximately normally distributed variable.
I also wrote a program to test your hypothesis about the sequences being too long, running the same number of trials and seeing what the longest string of heads is, the results are
19 22 18 25 23
Do these seem abnormal enough to explain the deviation, or is there a problem with your calculations?
It's not the highest that matters; it's the distribution within that range.
There was also a problem with my calculations, incidentally; a factor-of-two error, which is enough to explain most of the discreprency. What I did to calculate is, was to add up the harmonic sequence, up to around 24 (1+1/2+1/3+...+1/24), then doubling the last term (1+1/2+1/3+...+1/23 + 2/24). However, the code as given starts out with a 2, and then doubles the numerator with each added term; the calculation I should have used is (2+2/2+2/3+2/4+...+2/23+4/24). That leads to me expecting a value just a little over 7, which is pretty close.
...
I also ran a similar program. I copied and pasted Phil's, then modified it as slightly. My results were:
1 500523
2 250055
3 124852
4 62067
5 31209
6 15482
7 7802
8 4011
9 1978
10 1006
11 527
12 235
13 109
14 68
15 41
16 19
17 10
18 5
21 1
...where the left-hand column is the number of terms in a given sequence, and the right-hand column is the number of times that number of terms came up. Thus, there were 500523 runs of one term each; an insignificant distance from the expected number (500000). Most of the runs were very close to the expected value; interestingly, everything from 14 terms upwards for which there were any runs was above the expected number of runs, and often by a significant margin. The most significant is the single 21-term run; I expect to see 0.476 of those, and I see 1, slightly over twice the expectation. At 15 terms, I expected to see 30.517 runs; I saw 41 of those. At 17 terms, I expect to see 7.629 on average; I see 10 this time.
My final average sum is 7.25959229425851; a little higher than expected, but, now that I've corrected the factor-of-two error in my original calculation, not unexpectedly far off.
So most of the deviation is due to an error in my calculation. The rest is due to the fact that a 21-term or longer run turning up - which can easily happen - will probably pull the average sum up by 1 or more all by itself; it's easier for the average sum to be increased than decreased.