free banner exchange by Bpath.com Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Bizarre Distortions of Probability
I am a gamer. I am also a professional scientist. What do these things have to do with each other?

As a scientist, I am trained in the study of probability. I use this at work to determine whether something could happen by random chance, or whether it happens as the result of some cause. When something happens, no matter how unlikely it is, there is always some probability that it happened by chance. But as scientists, we reject the possibility of something very unlikely happening by chance. There comes a point at which we reject chance as being a possible explanation for something and say that there must be a causal factor at work. In particular, we put a lot of emphasis on multiple repeats. That means that if the same thing can be observed again and again under the same conditions, it must result from a cause and not just random chance.

Over the many years I've been a gamer (nearly twenty years at the time of writing this, in 2002), I've seen a lot of dice rolls. As a trained observer and a student of probability, I know what the distribution of results should be according to random chance, and there have been occasions where I saw things happen that could not have happened by random chance. This forces me to conclude that some other factor was at work. Call it what you will, luck, fate, or the work of evil spirits; there is something in this world that makes some people make dice rolls whose results are beyond the pale of what could reasonably happen by unhindered random chance.