Probabilities

I came across one of those future telling parrots today at the place where I'd gone for dinner. For the uninitiated, the way it works is this: There's a guy who's sitting with a parrot or two. The parrot(s) are stuck in a ghastly tiny cage. This guy has a whole set of cards along with him as well. To know how the future would go, you ask the question and at that time this guy spreads out the cards and opens the cage. The parrot comes out and randomly selects the card and based on that, voila! There's your future! All nicely laid out and decided by a parrot of all things...

Coming off a series of days where I've been glued to my seat in front of an astrologer who's been charting my life by a series of mathematical calculations pertaining to the position of stars, the parrot method seems positively unscientific! I have been consoled that this method does have its philosophy behind it. The point is that since you chose to ask that particular question at that particular time, the answer given by the parrot happened to be the it turned. And hence this technique is not one to be trifled with. You should ask the parrot a question only at a time when your mind is truly troubled with the question. Else a question pertaining to whether you are likely to meet your beautiful Princess/Prince Charming asked frivolously could end up with you having a frog for company.

Quite seriously, this has a very interesting point. The assumption that when a person asks a question at a particular time then he gets an answer which is the truth can lead to an interesting extension. It does mean that timing decides the answer to a question. Lets extend this to the simple coin tossing probability problem. Theoretically, if you toss a perfect coin infinite times then there should be exactly 50% heads and 50% tails. But with this time based parrot theory, the answer would depend on when you toss the coin. Therefore, if one tosses the coins at all heads destined times then we would get a clear bias in favour of heads...

Phew. I think the true conclusion is that too much chicken biriyani can lead to a heady cocktail of maths and parrot talk...