Cool. Is this right? For something with a 1/n chance of success I can have a 95% chance of success by making 3n attempts, for large values of n. About what does “large” mean here?
95% is a lower bound. It’s more than 95% for all numbers and approaches 95% as n gets bigger. If n=2 (E.G. a coin flip), then you actually have a 98.4% chance of at least one success after 3n (which is 6) attempts.
I mentioned this in the “What I’m not saying” section, but this limit converges rather quickly. I would consider any n≥4 to be “close enough”
Cool. Is this right? For something with a 1/n chance of success I can have a 95% chance of success by making 3n attempts, for large values of n. About what does “large” mean here?
95% is a lower bound. It’s more than 95% for all numbers and approaches 95% as n gets bigger. If n=2 (E.G. a coin flip), then you actually have a 98.4% chance of at least one success after 3n (which is 6) attempts.
I mentioned this in the “What I’m not saying” section, but this limit converges rather quickly. I would consider any n≥4 to be “close enough”