December 27th, 2003, 11:11 PM
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Orlando, FL
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Re: OT: Home Sick for the Holidays, or Probability and Yahtzee
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Obviously there's something wrong. The answer can't be negative. I think Excel still can't handle this kind of big / small number.
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I think that's because 1000! comes out to...
4.02387260077093773543702433923e+2567 
Anyone want to put a name to that number? 
The BINOMDIST function (with the TRUE parameter) gave me values steadily approaching 1 all the way up to 167, at which point Excel decided they were close enough to round to 1 (when I subtracted them from 1, the values were things like .1E-77 and the like). The odds of having no more than 167 sixes when rolling 1000 dice shouldn't be ~100%, should it?
The problem apparently occurs at 260 successes. The function calculates that the probability of having no more than 260 successes is slightly more than 1. This may be due to the rounding limitations of this function.
[ December 27, 2003, 21:46: Message edited by: Krsqk ]
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The Unpronounceable Krsqk
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