"I'll stick with the board"

Pedantic Moment: They're both Priests or Vicars or Preachers or whatever.

It's "I'll stick with the boring".

no it isnt, snothouse

I'll stick with a 4. As in 4 letter word.

Not that one.

Fakery

What x said.

The name of this game show is COUNTDOWN. According to Wikipedia you have to pick at least three vowels and four consonants in the Letters Round.

Live and learn.

http://www.askoxford.com/wordgames/countdown/rules/?view=uk

In the past a player could choose 8 consonants and one vowel.

I have no idea when this game took place or when they changed the rules so that a player had to pick at least 3 vowels.

Oops, forgot to carry my decimal places. The odds are actually 8.8X10^-11% and 1.8X10^-11%, respectively.

(end bearding)

this is the dumbest thing Ive ever heard in my life.

Your propability game is dumb, just because you took a class in discrete math for one semster does not make you a genius. It just so happens that it spells a word in english. If it was pure giberish, those odds would have still applied.

however, what you said would be true if BEFORE the cards were pulled that someone said "the word will be cuntflaps", but they didnt. Its just a word, no propability is involved or is needed.

Jesus, I cannot believe you have the gall to call me stupid.

Quick, what are the odds of flipping a penny 100 times and getting heads all 100 times? WHAT IF NO ONE MAKES SUCH A PREDICTION BEFOREHAND? Would you then take a video showing such an occurrence at face value despite the event's extremely low probability? Are you honestly claiming that probability does not exist if no one makes a prediction?

oh I got the gall and your still stupid.

the odds of that happening is "you're still stupid"

I agree that the video is a fake, but, as any ninth grade math text book chapter on probability will tell you, probability is found by dividing the number of favorable outcomes by the number of total possible outcomes.

Because nobody made any prediction about the outcome of the randomly selected letters, there were no favorable outcomes, and the chances of 'cuntflaps' being spelled out in this situation is the same as the chaces of 'dagkhienr' or any other combonation of letters being selected.

In conclusion; you're a pomous dick.

"Are you honestly claiming that probability does not exist if no one makes a prediction?"

oh man, I cant believe I missed this gem. Yes, probability does not exist if no one makes a prediction. Probability is the likelyhood of a PREDICTION coming true.

school, go there, learn something.

The relevant percentage odds are (something interesting)/(random letters)*100%. We'd still watch it if it was shitfists cockfairy dogfucker vaginabox etc. Fuck knows how to work that out. Choosing vowels and consonants complicates it too.

Right, first off, the snopes article clearly references the WANKMEOFF fake. Watch the video again... notice the word in question is CUNTFLAPS, not WANKMEOFF. Furthermore, while WANKMEOFF never appeared as a full word (as far as we know) there was a confirmed incident of two contestants getting the word WANKER, and on a separate occasion, GOBSHITE.

Does snopes tell us if this video is real or not? No. It doesn't say a thing about it. Is this video real? Being the professional video detective I am, my expert conclusion: who the fuck knows? The quality is jumpoy, but we do know that many segments are left on the cutting room floor- it's possible, albeit not probable, that this is an outtake similar to the WANKERS one. I'm going for fake, as Countdown is a popular target for hoaxs, but until someone with more time on their hands does some sleuthing, we simply don't know.

Now, as for probability, you're right in thinking that the odds of coming up with CUNTFLAPS are extremely low, but you're wrong in thinking that prevents CUNTFLAPS from appearing. The odds of randomly selecting SRKDUAEWN are similarly low, yet this string of letters has appeared. The word could have been FAGGOTASS, TARDFUCKS, BHULXZOAE- the odds would have been the same, the outcome would have been equally likely, and you'd still be sitting here baffled by the "mind blowing coincidence" that a random string of letters just happened to spell out a random word one time in a million iterations over a TV lifespan of two and a half decades.

Dr Drim is right in what he says. You all started shrieking about how random combinations like FGREQIHDA are equally unlikely as the one in the video, and that's true. I'd bet everything I own that that combination has never been produced on the show. But the entire point is that the outcome of "gibberish" is much more likely than the outcome of a nine-letter word because there are billions of pieces of total gibberish you can make and comparatively few nine-letter words. Furthermore, the fact that one unlikely outcome happens (like any specific combination of letters) doesn't mean another necessarily must. It's like saying "That man was struck by lightning, I must be able to win the lottery!"

The naughty words that have appeared were not nine letters, but six and seven respectively. Those have much better odds of appearing, and so would smaller specific combinations like "crap" or "gay." Every letter you add to a specific combination drastically reduces its chances of coming up.

Nobody's saying it "necessarily must", Mr Knuckles. What we're saying is you're an idiot for claiming it "necessarily musn't", which isn't the case at all. By the same token, you could flip out about how those "seven letter words", or even "four letter words" that appeared were "clearly faked", because what are the odds of them appearing? Just because the arrangement of the letters happens to have a vaguely understood meaning does not mean the odds of it appearing any different, which you seem to acknowledge.

You seem to be suffering from a faggier version of the Strong Anthropomorphic Principle- the video is too highly tuned! There's no way it could arise by chance! Let's ignore the hilarity of vicars reading a word like "CUNTCLAPS" and pull facts and figures out of our asses in order to prove that there's a Creator behind all of it!

Now that's not to say the video is real, but there's other ways to tell if it's fake then by trying to abuse probability.

You're still stupid, Knuckles, and it's not going to go away.

Your math in your first post still only proves the likelihood of someone saying "it's going to spell cuntflaps" and then having it spell cuntflaps. Nowhere does it take the number of words vs. the number of non-words into consideration.

You had no idea what you were doing, got called on it, pretended like you were some kind of genius, got called on it three more times, and then pretended like you never even said anything.

Even though you eventually came to the correct answer, once we deduct your lateness and attitude marks, I believe you'll find that it was quite the spectacular failure.

Wow. Just... wow.

the ownage is overpowering. Hopefully knuckles will pick up a math book and learn something because of this. I love the fact that knuckles keeps saying you can have probability without making a prediction, but in every case he ends up making a prediction after the fact.

I hate to do it, but I have to give this 5 stars (its my submission) just because of the public embarrassment.

You are angry, angry people.

Here are the two cents afforded by my overpriced Stanford education.

There's a lot of confused anger because we're conflating the Prior of just turning up this particular word with the Prior of turning up any sort of funny word (among other things). So let's look at the latter. How many really vulgar words are there in the English language? Let's say about...20. The ones not allowed on TV plus some extra fun words. Just assume they're all 4 letters long (most of the juicy ones are about this long anyways). I think we can do that without losing too much generality. Now, how many 5-letter words can combine with each of those? Let's generously say 1000 apiece. Thus, as has been pointed out angrily about ten times, since we're computing a prior probability, we take the number of favorable outcomes divided by the size of the sample space, and this gives us the probability of something hilarious and obscene being shown. Using our assumptions (and further assuming each letter appears on one card, which is perhaps a dubious assumption, but if it's wrong we'll probably not be off by more than a factor of ten), we get
(20 * 1000) / (26! / 17!) = 1.76 x 10^-8 = .00000176% chance of a combination starting with an hilarious, obscene word.

Now you can call this Knuckles fellow as dumb as you want, but you must admit that, assuming there are 20,000 hilarious things that can be shown, there is still a very tiny chance of a vulgar word/combination being shown. Even if you object to my approximations and say there are 1000 as many hilarious things that can appear as what I guessed (which is maybe reasonable, even, given my assumptions), there's still only a .001% chance of one being shown. Which isn't big. Real or not, one must admit it is pretty goddamn unlikely.

Sorry about wordiness. But there's a lot of silly ad hominem attacks and really tenuous arguments being thrown around here. This isn't youtube, people. For Christssake...

DEAR WIKIPEDIA TELL ME ABOUT THE GAMBLER'S FALLACY


A more subtle version of the fallacy is that an "interesting" (non-random looking) outcome is "unlikely" (eg that a sequence of "1,2,3,4,5,6" in a lottery result is less likely than any other individual outcome). Even apart from the debate about what constitutes an "interesting" result, this can be seen as a version of the gambler's fallacy because it is saying that a random event is less likely to occur if the result, taken in conjunction with recent events, will produce an "interesting" pattern.


THANK YOU WIKIPEDIA

I like the big probability nerdgasm and everyone talking about CSI ZOOM ENHANCE TO SPOT THE EDITING, but no one is mentioning all the reactions and dialog to match a dirty word randomly showing up.

That's true for any specific string, dumbass.

See gambler's fallacy.

This is quite a good web site.

SIR!! THE ODDS OF THAT HAPPENING IS IMPOSSIBLE!!!! YOU CAN ONLY GET GIBBERISH ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OF THE TIME!!!!!

Not only that, but Carol says "Wash your mouth out," while chuckling. She also laughs quietly again when the word is complete.

Same goes for pre-load images.