The supertask of an infinite lottery

DOI10.2143/LEA.236.0.3186064zbMATH Open1381.60009arXiv1511.08182MaRDI QIDQ5283790FDOQ5283790

Authors: Timber Kerkvliet 

Publication date: 25 July 2017

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.

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

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zbMATH Keywords

finite additivityuniform probabilityinfinite lotterysupertask

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Axioms; other general questions in probability (60A05)

Cited In (1)

• How to build an infinite lottery machine

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