Frank started up a discussion on this topic a while ago. Originally it was going to be moved off of vpfree and then decided to remain on vpfree. I haven't seen the final product yet.
For those of you who wonder about such things, if you were to state your hypothesis and say what measurement you would accept to either prove or disprove your hypothesis, I'm sure the throngs of stats people on this board would tell you if your experiment is valid or not. ( Frank's program may do all of this already).
Here's a quickie outline of what the process should be:
1) figure out what you want to prove. This can be due to previous play, rumors, second hand stories or whatever. Note that the previous play cannot be used to confirm or refute the hypothesis.
You need to make this very specific
2) Set up your experiment.
3) decide on your acceptance criteria
4) Post the info and let the stats guys go at it.
For example, Miss Craps recently posted about going 0 for 35 on dealt trips on 10 play ( converting to quads). This is step 1. Miss Craps believes that the machines she was playing have a quad distibution outside the normal range. So, her hypothesis is that On machine xxx, the distribution of quads is much less can be expected.
For step 2, you need to choose sample size and parameters. I will play 2000 dealt hands of triple play and record the number of times I am dealt trips and the number of times I convert them. I will also keep track of the total number of quads in the sample as an additional measure
For step 3, I can pick 90% sure, 95% sure, 99% sure or whatever number I want. I will need to adjust the number of samples based on the frequency of the event and the confidence level
Post the information and see what the group thinks.
Is this a major pain? Sure it is. But is the only way to really know if there is an issue or not.
This is a very simplified outline. For a good experiment, you would need to look at sources of error, repeats, blocking ( if you suspect certain quads are absent) and data recording errors. It is all doable but it is much easier to say " I played 4 hours and only got 1 quad, the machines must be cheating me"
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