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Following the tradition of the problem, suppose that in the population of two-child families, the sex of the two children is independent of one another, equally likely boy or girl, and that the birth date of each child is independent of the other child. The chance of being born on any given day of the week is 1 / 7 .
The uniform distribution or rectangular distribution on [a,b], where all points in a finite interval are equally likely, is a special case of the four-parameter Beta distribution. The Irwin–Hall distribution is the distribution of the sum of n independent random variables, each of which having the uniform distribution on [0,1].
In the case of tossing a fair coin, frequentists say that the probability of getting a heads is 1/2, not because there are two equally likely outcomes but because repeated series of large numbers of trials demonstrate that the empirical frequency converges to the limit 1/2 as the number of trials goes to infinity.
The following table shows the probability for some other values of n (for this table, the existence of leap years is ignored, and each birthday is assumed to be equally likely): The probability that no two people share a birthday in a group of n people. Note that the vertical scale is logarithmic (each step down is 10 20 times less likely).
However, the conclusion that the sun is equally likely to rise as it is to not rise is only absurd when additional information is known, such as the laws of gravity and the sun's history. Similar applications of the concept are effectively instances of circular reasoning , with "equally likely" events being assigned equal probabilities, which ...
[18]: 274–275 The result of this is that every possible combination of individuals who could be chosen for the sample has an equal chance to be the sample that is selected (that is, the space of simple random samples of a given size from a given population is composed of equally likely outcomes).
The Principle of Indifference of Laplace states that equipossible alternatives may be accorded equal probabilities if nothing more is known about the underlying probability distribution. However, it is a matter of contention whether the concept of equipossibility, also called equispecificity (from equispecific), can truly be distinguished from ...
For example, when tossing an ordinary coin, one typically assumes that the outcomes "head" and "tail" are equally likely to occur. An implicit assumption that all outcomes are equally likely underpins most randomization tools used in common games of chance (e.g. rolling dice, shuffling cards, spinning tops or wheels, drawing lots, etc.).