Statistics

[Paul B]

I recently saw the results of a stage at a major match where 3 competitors had the same time to the hundredth. The stage was 18 rounds and involved some movement.

Has anyone seen this happen before? I took statistics in college, but for the life of me I can't figure out the likelihood here.

At what point would you question the timer and how would you even go about doing that?

[BSeevers]

Probably a stage with a lot of movers. Sometimes they "control" the time to shoot a stage and the big dogs are close because they are a big dog and push the stage to its limits.

Bad timer? I have no idea but its possible.

[pskys2]

Here's one for you:

At the Sunflower Classic I ran a 50 yard+ field/track meet course. 1 Door Activated Clamshell and 17 other open targets with the closest at 5 yards, furthest 10 yards. Pretty much a runnin' hose fest, but you'd be surprised at the number of competitors who Mike'd a 10 yard target after several 5 yarders.

Anyway, I had a Son, then the father shoot Open Class one right after the other.

The Son was young and FASSST, hosed through in 20.76 seconds and left me winded (but he never got away from me).

The Father was quick and SMOOOTH, he never really stopped and I kept up well the time, you guessed it 20.76.

BTW Son edged Dad by a couple of points.

Kind of cool.

[Patrick Sweeney]

Nothing unusual. With shooters of similar skill levels, facing an identical task, times will cluster around the center of the bell curve. The shorter the times, the more likely you are to have identical times.

I recall a statistics profesor who gave a test first day of class: toss a coin 200 times and record the results. The grades were either an A or an F. The trick is this; if you toss a coin that many times, you are almost certain (99.99+%) to come up with six in a row of heads or tails. If you're just faking it, and writing down H-T-T-H-T, etc, you'd never think to do six in a row. Those with six got A's, those without got Fs, as they were faking it.

Statistics are funny, and very counter-intuitive.

[Greg Jones]

The trick is this; if you toss a coin that many times, you are almost certain (99.99+%) to come up with six in a row of heads or tails.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Interesting, even if off-topic. At first I thought the professor needed a refresher in probability as each flip of the coin is an independent event, meaning that there is always a 1/2 chance that the coin will come up heads (or tails) regardless of the past results. The probability that the coin will come up the same six times in a row is 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2, for odds of 1/64, or about 1.5%. However I did find reference to Benford's law which does support the concept that 6 alike tosses in a row will occur very frequently out of 200 coin tosses.

[DogmaDog]

Hmmm. I saw another bit of statistical trivia--how many people do you need in a room before it's an even bet that two of them have the same birthday (ignoring quirks like twins or leap year)?

Turns out the answer is only 23. If there are 23 people, there's a slightly better than 50:50 chance that two of them have the same birthday.

The math basically involved figuring out the probability that X people will all have different birthdays.

Neither here nor there, but I would guess times for IPSC stages would not be normally distributed, and would usually be very close near the top of the standings. 3-way tie? Not improbable.

DD