Site Searching Statistics Questions

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Well, the problem is that I remember none of this math.

Hmmm... I think this would be a working model... Though a bit innacurate, fairly approximate.

Take four quarters, toss them, and put them down on a table. Heads is a site, tails, no sites. The table is the province. Now put a blank napkin on the coins that came up tails. No site here. For each coin heads up, write F, E, W, A, S, B, N, D, H on a napkin, representing each site path, including holy. Not looking, randomly take one of these napkins and put it on top of the coin, letter hidden.

To further complicate the model, you could write a number representing the level of the path. But for simplicities sake, we'll assume the site will only be searched with level nine remote site searches, e.g. Dark Knowledge, and ignore the site level.

One logic flaw with this model is the idea that sites of all paths are equal. Holy is notably rarer, for instance, because there just aren't as many sites.

[Evilhomer]

The inaccuracy of indypendents example is that the unknown "head" probability has four positions to be at (so you would have to compensate with a factor of 4 here), while each tail in the example only has one position (while having four "cases" instead).

Probably pretty fuzzy explanation, but if we simplify to Baalz original 4 random coin flips, 3 known the chance for the last unknown is 50% heads and 50% tails (as Baalz wrote).

That said I am not sure about the mechanic behind site distribution so I am not sure how well the coin flipp theory works. It is however always better to search provinces with few sites for the simple reason that 4 sites is the maximum (thus you cannot find 2 new sites, if you have already found 3 for example).