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RENESA Spring Edition 2022
different if he hadn’t bluffed his way to victory in a poker tournament. A lot of powerful characters are depicted to be good at poker: Harvey Specter in Suits, James Bond in Casino Royale, Henry Gondorff in The Sting, Rusty Ryan in Ocean’s Eleven, and so on. Deception is the sine qua non of poker. In chess, it all comes down to a battle of wits, again. Every move is interpreted by two human minds, each with its idiosyncrasies. When you play against someone you begin to form a sense of their beliefs and preferences, which may not always be objective. You prey on the beliefs of your opponent and present them with the opportunity to deceive themselves. World Champion Emanuel Lasker has shown legendary prowess at this technique. “If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?’’ But there is more to winning than just satiating your dopamine appetite. Shooting for the stars keeps you going, it gives you purpose to be the best version of yourself. So you could choose to bluff your way through life or call out other people’s bluffs, but you got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.
P(Guilty|Innocent) =? WRITTEN BY
ILLUSTRATED BY
Tanmay Dadhania
Tanishka Sonavane
Comps 3rd year
ECE 2nd Year
Vishvesh Trivedi Comps 2nd year
An unusual bustle was present outside the Chester Crown court on the 28th of October 1999. A crestfallen 35-year-old solicitor, Sally Clark, who had recently lost both of her infant children to the mysterious Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) was facing charges of allegedly murdering them. And what followed is perhaps regarded as one of the biggest blunders of employing statistics in courts. The prosecutors had roped in statisticians to quantify the chances of two SIDS deaths from the same womb. One-in-seventy-three million was the number presented to the jury of the chances of Sally being innocent. The statisticians considered each infant’s death as an independent event thereby multiplying the probabilities to itself, resulting in an oddly slim figure which spoke against the defendant. Genetic RENESA Spring Edition 2022
factors, biological reasons, and scientific intricacies of SIDS were completely overlooked during the trial. Consequently, Sally Clark was declared guilty and awarded a non-bailable life sentence based on this highly dubious mathematical ratio. Apart from being reviled by the media for being a child-killer, she spent nearly four years behind closed bars. Later on, she was released on additional findings in the case, but the damage was done. The trauma of the deaths and the trial took a huge toll on her mental health eventually prompting her to commit suicide, four years later. In the same year when Sally was freed, another woman from Australia was charged along the same lines. Convicted of murdering her three children and manslaughtering one. Astoundingly, the same obsolete theory of using seemingly improbable events in determining guilt was used. Perhaps, the courtrooms across continents were still plagued by misconstrued probabilities. All of these mishaps arise from the misunderstanding of a concept well-known to our crowds, Bayes’ Theorem. Aptly dubbed the “Prosecutor’s Fallacy”, the error assumes that the P(A|B) == P(B|A), the probability of A given B has occurred is the same as the probability of B given A has occurred. By design,
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