Nico Franz

1981 Cottbus, DE

6 Colors - Probability calculation experiment, 2020

Pixel on Canvas

On the left the pixels randomly created from six colors, on the right these pixels sorted by color. The two upper tiles have many pixels, the lower ones few

Probability calculation experiment

The law of large numbers

The greater the number of executions of processes with high similarity, the smaller the influence of chance on the frequency of possible process results. As a result, the practical frequency of possible process results approaches more and more its probable frequency until the ideal-typical frequency is approximately reached.

Examples

Color determination by means of random generator

If you create a large number of colored pixels with a random generator (left) and then sort the same pixels according to their colors (right), you will see that the number of occurrences of the individual colors approaches more and more as the number of generated elements increases (above and below).

Dice game

If you roll the dice only 12 or 24 times, single values will dominate. For example, a 2 or even a 3 may have been rolled very often. Other numbers, on the other hand, may not have been rolled at all. If, on the other hand, the dice are rolled very often and the results are counted, the frequency of the numbers will always be approximately the same. So there will always be approximately as many ones as twos, threes and so on. The more often you roll the dice, the more the individual frequencies become equal. If you roll the dice very often, the numbers will occur approximately the same number of times.

Gender distribution of the world

The physical sex of a human being is determined by its genetic makeup, more precisely by the type of chromosomes. Two variants of chromosomes occur in nature:

XY chromosome (male sex)
XX chromosome (female sex)

Since there are two possibilities, the law of large numbers can be applied here as well. If one pairs a large number of people, there is an equal frequency of male and female offspring. This is the reason why there are as many men as women on earth.

However, regionally there are strong fluctuations, e.g. in Germany.