probability

Does anybody have any estimates or methods of calculating the probability of the universe even being here?

The Series of Dice Rolls thread reminded me of some weird math paradoxes described in Martin Gardner's Colossal Book of Mathematics. Actually I'm not sure if they should be considered "paradoxes" just incredibly nonintuitive. Here's one: Let's say you have two hats (black and gray) on a...

You have three balls in a sack, randomly colored either solid white or solid black, so that the combination of colors is unknown. Pull out one ball and note it's color and replace in sack. Repeat two more times. If all three pulls are the same color ball, what is the probability that the...

I made a post in the thread 'The Motivated Assumption' claiming that For those who haven't been following the quantum mechanics of it all, suppose I've encoded Two Towers in a rigged coin. The digits of the probability of a heads result (in a binary number base, let's say) reproduce the binary...