I get all the news I need from the sports section
Sports players (or teams) are often described as being hot or cold, implying there is something inherently "streaky" about an athlete's performance that extrapolates to the next try. Using data from 10 seasons of professional basketball and more than a century of major-league baseball, physicist Sid Redner argues that scoring is a memoryless random process -- suggesting that the notion of a scoring streak is a fallacy and that win/loss records in professional baseball teams are similarly memoryless. Finally, he shows that our favorite pastime is getting progressively more competitive -- no more dynasties or perennial losers.
Sid Redner is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
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SFI’s 2014 Community Lecture series is generously sponsored by Thornburg Investment Management