Gradual Reduction in MF Effectiveness

[Jarulf]

If no one were to see this type of drop patten occuring at times, that would actually be indicative of a different sort of problem with how the items are being generated.  A random system of this nature that does not exhibit certain types of 'streakiness' and psuedo cyclic patterns would not in fact be a real random system.  This is an aspect of random systems that many have a geat problem in understanding and coming to grips with, they tend to expect that the result will look rather 'flat' and 'uniform' at any level of examination.

I like to "quote" an article in a magazine I once read (Scientific American?? can't remmeber which one) about a professor in statistics whoe would in one of the first classes ask the students to go home and toss a coin 200 times and write down the result of each toss. Of course, many students simply skiped the tossing and wrote down their own randomly "appearing" 200 rolls. He usually had NO problem spotting those that cheated in this way. Why? Because they never had long streaks of the same result. Tossing a coind 200 times gives a VERY high chance of getting 5, 6 and even 7 identical results in a row. Most people would rule out such results as not "random enough". The stidents writing down results trying to make them look random, seldom had more than 3 of the same result in a row. Just shows how hard time people in general have to understand randomness and what is normal and what is not.