Never Say Never

   If you seem to have bad luck at getting something to happen you shouldn't give up on trying to make it happen because there's a mathematical probability formula that is proven to be right that shows the more times you try to do something the greater chance you have of it happening.

  Let's say you want to flip a coin and have it land on heads. Each coin flip there's a 50% chance it will either land on heads or tails. That is true, but your chance to get heads increases over multiple attempts.

  Why you may ask? Well, I think you'll agree that if we were to flip the coin 100 times it is extremely likely that we'll get heads at least once, right? That is intuative. And it is true of anything you do, not just flipping coins. But why is this?

   Well, here is the formula to calculate it:

                1-((1-X)^Y)=Z

   X = the % chance for a given try (50% in the case of a coin flip)

   Y = the number of trys (ex: number of coin flips)

   Z = the % probability of it happening

    So, if you were to flip a coin 100 times trying to get heads you have:

                1-((1-50)^100) = 100%

    If you flipped the coin only say 15 times you'd get:

                1-((1-50)^15) = 99.99%

    So just flipping the coin 15 times gives you a darn good chance already. In fact not until you drop the number of flips below 7 does the % chance drop below 99%. Of course, that doesn't mean that if you flip a coin 7 times one will come up heads because there's still a 1% chance  that it won't. And in actuality, even with 100 flips there's still a really small chance that heads won't come up. This is due to rounding of the numbers when calculating the percentages. But this chance is infinitesimally small.

So small that it is extremely unlikely to occur. However, not impossible.

So, never say never.

   And for fun here is a probability calculator for you to use to see what chance you have of doing something of your own. Have Fun!
(thanks to Brian Wood and this site for this information and the following code)

Drop chance (enter 1% as 1); Number of runs;