Example 1:
Suppose the population within a certain area is such that there are 3,497,419 females and 2,812,822 males (for a total population of 6,310,241)
If a random sample of 12 jurors is selected from this region, how many of the jurors will be women?
For an individual case, the answer could be anywhere from 0 to 12.
The law of large numbers says that if this process is repeated many times the average will be
=6.65 (approximately)
Example 2:
A casino runs a wheel with numbers from 0 to 20.
A player pays $1 to play for each spin and gets $2 back if the wheel comes up with an odd number.
Since there are 11 odd numbers, the casino could be expected to win 11 out of 21 times (roughly 52.4% of the time).
With these values in mind a simulation was run with varying numbers of spins with the following results:
number of spins casino wins/losses
While in the short run (note the example with 10 spins), the casino might lose, in the long run profitability is guaranteed.
William Appel
Expert
2022-01-18Added 44 answers
As more trials are performed, probability approaches classical probability. For example, if a fair coin is tossed 1,000,000 times, about half of the tosses will come up heads, and half will come up tails.