Friday, August 31, 2012

Could you please correct your miscalculation, Dr. Dembski?

William A. Dembski wrote "a long article […] on conservation of information. " at Evolution News and Views (ENV), an outlet of the Discovery Institute. Others have commented on more sophisticated problems, either at Uncommon Descent or at The Skeptical Zone. Here I want just to correct some simple math which occurs in a toy example used in the article:
To see how this works, let's consider a toy problem. Imagine that your search space consists of only six items, labeled 1 through 6. Let's say your target is item 6 and that you're going to search this space by rolling a fair die once. If it lands on 6, your search is successful; otherwise, it's unsuccessful. So your probability of success is 1/6. Now let's say you want to increase the probability of success to 1/2. You therefore find a machine that flips a fair coin and delivers item 6 to you if it lands heads and delivers some other item in the search space if it land tails. What a great machine, you think. It significantly boosts the probability of obtaining item 6 (from 1/6 to 1/2).