Imagine a coin-tossing game.\u00a0 On each turn, players toss a fair coin 500 times.\u00a0 As they do so, they record all runs of heads, so that if they toss H T T H H H T H T T H H H H T T T, they will record: 1, 3, 1, 4, representing the number of heads in each run.<\/p>\n
At the end of each round, each player computes the product of their runs-of-heads.\u00a0 The person with the highest product wins.<\/p>\n
In addition, there is a House jackpot.\u00a0 Any person whose product exceeds 1060<\/sup> wins the House jackpot.<\/p>\n There are 2500<\/sup> possible runs of coin-tosses.\u00a0 However, I’m not sure exactly how many of that vast number of possible series would give a product exceeding 1060<\/sup>. However, if some bright mathematician can work it out for me, we can work out whether a series whose product exceeds 1060<\/sup> has CSI.\u00a0 My ballpark estimate says it has.<\/p>\n That means, clearly, that if we randomly generate many series of 500 coin-tosses, it is exceedingly unlikely, in the history of the universe, that we will get a product that exceeds 1060<\/sup>.<\/p>\n However, starting with a randomly generated population of, say 100 series, I propose to subject them to random point mutations and natural selection, whereby I will cull the 50 series with the lowest products, and produce “offspring”, with random point mutations from each of the survivors, and repeat this over many generations.<\/p>\n I’ve already reliably got to products exceeding 1058<\/sup>, but it’s possible that I may have got stuck in a local maximum.<\/p>\n However, before I go further: would an ID proponent like to tell me whether, if I succeed in hitting the jackpot, I have satisfactorily refuted Dembski’s case? And would a mathematician like to check the jackpot?<\/p>\n I’ve done it in MatLab, and will post the script below.\u00a0 Sorry I don’t speak anything more geek-friendly than MatLab (well, a little Java, but MatLab is way easier for this).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine a coin-tossing game.\u00a0 On each turn, players toss a fair coin 500 times.\u00a0 As they do so, they record all runs of heads, so that if they toss H T T H H H T H T T H … Continue reading