Re: reliability (no poker content)
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look, will one of you two tell me why you're disregarding the poisson? it was designed for situations of this sort...
and btw, for a triple occurence, only approximately 1 will occur in a year...
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The poisson distribution assumes discrete intervals, not continuous ones (sorry if my terminology is awkward) - i.e. poisson will give you the expected number of failures in three hour intervals such as 00:00 - 03:00, 03:00 - 06:00 etc. A failure at 2:30 and another at 3:30 would overlap, but in the poisson they would be in different three-hour periods, and wouldn't get counted.
I think a better way to phrase it might be that the poisson is concerned with events in a given period, whereas I'm concerned with the proximity of events.
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