What Are The Odds?

[Smowball]

I'm sat here just checking my bank statement online. It shows that last Saturday I went to Sainsbury's and spent £16.74. That afternoon I then went to Lidl and spent .....£16.74! What a strange coincidence!

[albaqwerty]

at least your numbers are nicer than mine !

I have a problem with 3 digits, they follow me like a bad smell.

Went to Iceland (shop) spent £6.66, then went to Lidl and got £6.66 in change, I just came home after that.

[Peter Pedant]

one in ten thousand I think
so that the expectation of finding one in a run of a ten thousand entries - is ....one

BUT - the proper mathematicians will come along soon
You wouldnt write in if one day you drew out £50 and the next day you few out another £50 ! hey look they are the same !

so the figures arent randomly distributed
s/o else can have a go .......

[Peter Pedant]

hey alba
the road outside my work place used to be the A666

and I would often say - you go up the route of the Beast
and everyone used to look at me ......as tho I were possessed.

Didnt know the exorcist I say

[jim360]

This one time I went to a supermarket and spent £19.32, which by a strange coincidence is also my PIN number.

[Mamyalynne]

I live a few hundred yards from the Devil's Highway (A666).

[albaqwerty]

Jim, I hope you've now changed your pin no. :-)

Triple 6 was also in my first mobile's number, much to the delight of my friends who found it hilarious.

I was born on the 13th, am left-handed so really shouldn't be surprised I s'pose.
Also never knew there was a road A666, every day is a school-day lol

[jim360]

What's even freakier is when I had four bills in a row of £12.21, £56.32, £40.10 and £11.21, giving my Card number and all!

Amazing coincidences.

[Peter Pedant]

hmm I have never had a pay in amount as the same as in my credit card pin
sort of 4061 or near enough .....
worse luck

[Bazile]

The question is did you actually went to these supermarkets and spend said amounts ?

[Jackdaw33]

I am always amazed when my bill comes to an exact number of £, though the odds are only 99/1.

[Smowball]

Bazile I did actually ring the bank as I thought it was so odd. I did indeed go to those shops but hadn't realised the amounts were identical.

[Garaman]

What would be strange is if no such coincidences happened.

[zebo]

On a tour of India with ten overnight stops we were in Room 101 nine times, we felt picked upon!

[zebo]

The A666, Blackburn road, Notlob by-pass, sat in traffic on numerous occasions. Oddly I never heard it referred to as the Devil's Highway, the one I recall is Death Valley on the M62 from Swinton, a horrible stretch of road.

[EcclesCake]

A friend received a new PIN, 0629. She remembered it as 'no sex to night'. :-)

[EcclesCake]

Zeno, a colleague of mine work in a lab, Room 101.

To make things worse it was padded and had bars on the windows and complex door locks, oh how we laughed!

[Old_Geezer]

The odds of what ? That it ever occurred ? That it occurred to you ? That it occurred that particular afternoon ? That you found something at sometime surprising enough to start a thread on ? Depending on what you want the odds for the value can vary wildly from dead cert to ∞ to 1.

[fiction-factory]

Last week I saw eight cars in a row that were black. I checked the figures on car colours and as 20% are black it appears the chances were something like (1/5)⁸ which is around 1/390000. Of course I have not remembered the other millions of times in my lifetime when nothing remarkable occurred in terms of colour sequences. (Apart perhaps from the time I say seven black cars in a row, also on the same stretch of road outside the crematorium.)
Million to one chances happen all the time of course somewhere to someone- winning the lottery for example.

[Baldric]

Wow!