Memetic Index
Introduction
I'm still trying to take it all in, but a buddy of mine clued me in to the idea of Pascal's Triangle producing a distribution, a normal one, and a discrete one, in fact, for an experiment consisting of a series of binomial trials.
His idea is that this discrete distribution may be used to assess the reliability of a poll, for example, taken as a sample from a population about preference for Candidate A versus Candidate B, for instance. I may be misquoting, and I'm still chewing on this idea. He said that this information may be gotten from the "two tails" of the discrete distribution, outside of the probability value of the given sample.
Pascal's Triangle
| 0 | 1 | 0 | ||||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | |||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | ||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | |||||||
| 0 | 1 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1 | 0 | ||||||
| 0 | 1 | 5 | 10 | 10 | 5 | 1 | 0 |
An Example
| TTTT | TTTH | TTHH | TTHT |
| THTT | THTH | THHH | THHT |
| HTTT | HTTH | HTHH | HTHT |
| HHTT | HHTH | HHHH | HHHT |