108 DOUBLE STITCHES: Is Playing Roto Baseball Season After Season The Same as Shooting a 3 Point Shot In Basketball?

The Law of Truly Large Numbers

The Law of Truly Large Numbers
With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million [as the mathematician Littlewood (1953) required for an event to be surprising] are bound to be plentiful in a population of 250 million people. If a coincidence occurs to one person in a million each day, then we expect 250 occurrences a day and close to 100,000 such occurrences a year.
Going from a year to a lifetime and from the population of the United States to that of the world (5 billion at this writing), we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events. When such events occur, they are often noted and recorded. If they happen to us or someone we know, it is hard to escape that spooky feeling.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/methods-for-studying-coincidences/

16 February 2012

Is Playing Roto Baseball Season After Season The Same as Shooting a 3 Point Shot In Basketball?

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

CHICAGO, IL - JANUARY 15: Dwyane Wade #3 of t...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Reinforcement learning in complex natural environments is a challenging task because the agent should generalize from the outcomes of actions taken in one state of the world to future actions in different states of the world.

The extent to which human experts find the proper level of generalization is unclear. Here we show, using the sequences of field goal attempts made by professional basketball players, that the outcome of even a single field goal attempt has a considerable effect on the rate of subsequent 3 point shot attempts, in line with standard models of reinforcement learning. However, this change in behaviour is associated with negative correlations between the outcomes of successive field goal attempts. These results indicate that despite years of experience and high motivation, professional players overgeneralize from the outcomes of their most recent actions, which leads to decreased performance.

Click here to drown in the details.