We all toss around words like likely and impossible, but we rarely try to quantify what they mean. That job is left to experts in probability and statistics. Often our perception of how likely something is has very little to do with how likely it really is, which is good news for people who run state lotteries.
How likely something is can be expressed in terms of a probability distribution. For example, if you have a six-sided die and it is weighted fairly, you would expect it to be equally probable that the die would land ...
