Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chiefalchemist 2960 days ago
Not accurate. It depends on how many times you play.

That matters here because we're not talking about any single cell or single strand of DNA. We're talking about millions upon gazillion. So "the game" is being played an unimaginable number of times. Clearly that changes the possibility of an outcome.

1 comments

> "the game" is being played an unimaginable number of times.

Actually, it's quite imaginable. Not only is it imaginable, it's fairly straightforward to calculate an upper bound on the actual number, and from there to calculate the odds of producing the same gene completely independently more than once. If you do the math you will find that the odds are indistinguishable from zero.