The supertask of an infinite lottery

DOI10.2143/LEA.236.0.3186064MaRDI QIDQ5283790zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Timber Kerkvliet

Publication date 25 July 2017

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.08182

zbMATH Keywords

finite additivityuniform probabilityinfinite lotterysupertask

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Axioms; other general questions in probability (60A05)

Abstract: We mathematically model the supertask, introduced by Hansen, in which an infinity of gods together select a random natural number by each randomly removing a finite number of balls from an urn, leaving one final ball. We show that this supertask is highly underdetermined, i.e. there are many scenarios consistent with the supertask. In particular we show that the notion of uniformity for finitely additive probability measures on the natural numbers emerging from this supertask is unreasonably weak.

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