Tagged “probability”

Jupyter notebook by Peter Norvig working through some prob problems.

Good one to work through.

With random arrivals, pileups are terrible

If customers take on avg 10 minutes to serve and arrive randomly at a rate of 5.8 per hour, then with one bank teller working, expected wait is 5 hours. With two tellers, 3 minutes.

Some good bits around how using past information can backfire. Either overfitting if looking too far back, or spending too much effort on predictions.

Enough effort goes into an initial forecast that updating your views when new information becomes available can trigger the sunk-cost fallacy and cause you to be right or wrong for the wrong reason.