What are the differences between zombies and normal sims?
Garnet Avi:
*shrugs* Like I said, I'm bad at probability math. I'm really good at algebra, but I could not follow that proof you did at all. For some reason, calculating odds wars with my intuition, just confusing me. Anyway, I stand by my conclusion: you're better off using a hack or cheat if you want aliens.
seelindarun:
Your intuition should help more with probability than algebra. ;)
Think of betting on a single 6-sided die. Betting on any given number for a single roll gives 1 in 6 odds. Suppose now that you are allowed 10 rolls to pay back on your bet, that is, if your number comes up in any of the 10 rolls, you win. All of a sudden these odds are much better, no? It is certainly possible that your number will not come up in any of the 10 rolls, since randomness is at play, but intuitively you know that your chances are much better if you're allowed 10 rolls as opposed to just one.
This is because it doesn't matter which of the rolls produces your number. We're not asked to predict which roll will produce a win. We're asking a different question: will we win on any of our rolls? Novotny's proof answers the question: how probable is it that all 10 rolls consecutively fail to produce our number?
Your intuition says that if you roll 20 times, it will be even less likely that you'll fail all of the 20 rolls.
If you're willing to have a sim stargaze every night of his adult life, you'll most likely get some poor sim probed by the second generation, if not sooner. No hacks necessary.
gjam:
Quote from: Garnet Avi on 2008 April 22, 18:52:00
*shrugs* Like I said, I'm bad at probability math. I'm really good at algebra, but I could not follow that proof you did at all. For some reason, calculating odds wars with my intuition, just confusing me.
If you have already flipped a coin twice, and it came up tails both times, and you ask what the probability is that you will get heads on the next flip, the answer is 50%. It doesn't matter if you just got 10 tails in a row, or 100, or none. The odds for any single flip are always the same: 50%. You are right about that.
But if you are going to flip a coin multiple times, and ask what the probability is that you will get heads at least once during those multiple flips, you are asking a completely different question.
- If you flip a coin once, there are two possible outcomes: H or T. One of those includes one or more heads, so the probability with one flip is 1 in 2, or 50%
- If you flip a coin twice, there are four possible outcomes: HH, HT, TH, or TT. Three of those include one or more heads, so the probability with two flips is 3 in 4, or 75%
- If you flip a coin three times, there are eight possible outcomes: HHH, HHT, HTH, HTT, THH, THT, TTH, TTT. Seven of those include one or more heads, so the probability with three flips is 7 in 8, or 87.5%.
- If you flip a coin four times, there are 16 possible outcomes: HHHH, HHHT, HHTH, ... (you try listing the rest). 15 of those include one or more heads, so the probability with four flips is 15 in 16, or 93.5%.
See how it keeps getting larger? This is why the overall chances for success are greater with multiple tries, even though the chances for any single try never change.
Quote from: Garnet Avi on 2008 April 22, 18:52:00
Anyway, I stand by my conclusion: you're better off using a hack or cheat if you want aliens.
Yes. But not as much better off as you think.
Ellatrue:
Depends on how you feel about your sim wasting their entire fertile life stargazing from 9 to 4 with less than 100% odds. If I want my sim to have an alien baby, I generally want it near the beginning of the adult stage with the other children. So for storyline purposes, I'd still use a cheat. I'm very partial to the higher odds telescopes.
cwykes:
Quote from: notovny on 2008 April 22, 16:40:14
True. However In the long-gone Varioussimmers thread twoJeffs mentioned that the stargaze animation was 5-6 minutes long, so I just went with 5.5 as a reasonable estimation, though having not timed a lot of them myself, I don't know whether the true time is closer to 5 or to 6 minutes (or even, come to think of it now, whether twoJeffs just pulled the number out of thin air.). Given how important that number winds up being over thousands of repetitions, though, I suppose there's a case for just throwing the raw number in there.
I blame treacherous memory.I might have had a reason to just do 7PM to 4AM, based on vague recollection of a long-gone thread at varioussimmers. But going with 7PM to 4:30AM results in numbers even closer to 5% with the 5.5 minute assupmtion I'd been using. So at this point, I'll retreat a bit from probably unwarranted precision and call the odds of getting abducted once or more times in a full night of 7PM-4:30 AM stargazing to "about 1 in 20" and the odds of getting abducted once or more times in a full adult lifetime of such stargazing to "about 3 in 4."
Memory and assumptions get you every time... This is getting closer, but I'm still reaching on the window of opportunity...... what do you think?
"The odds of abduction are 0.05% in any stargazing cycle (1 in 2,000 every 5-6 mins). That's from stargazing with the expensive telescope (the cheaper scope doesn't have the code for abduction on it). Your sim can probably only manage about 9 hours of stargazing a night (7pm-6am) before collapsing from needs failure, so his chances of getting abducted are about 5% or 1 in 20 per night. Even if your sim spends every night of his adult life stargazing until he collapses from exhaustion, he has only about a 3 in 4 chance of getting abducted, so if you want him to get alien pregnant you'll probably have to resort to elixir of life. Remember near-elders can't get pregnant."
1. Yes it would be good to stick the exact length of the stargazing cycle into the math - you can't argue sensibly about the exact answer if you are doing the maths with approximate numbers.
2. Incomplete cycles - it's probably correct to include incomplete cycles as the dice is rolled at the start of the cycle. That's not going to make a big difference to the overall answer though.
3. What's still bugging me is the window of opportunity for abduction because it makes a big difference to the answer and because it's a basic fact about abduction. If a sim could do 11 hours of stargazing instead of 9 you'd be closer to 90% than 74% over the long term.
I came across posts about abductions from the electro dance sphere the other day. Is that for real or was there some long fixed bug causing sims to disappear from the dance sphere?
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