Design Detection Reported on CBS’s 60 Minutes

_{Barry Arrington
November 30, 2008

Intelligent Design

3}_{Categories
Intelligent Design}

Share: Facebook; Twitter/X; LinkedIn; Flipboard; Print; Email

This evening the CBS News show 60 Minutes reported on an impressive example of design detection in the on-line poker world.

Online gambling has grown in a few short years to a 16 billion dollar a year industry, and a big part of that growth has come from internet poker. Recently several professional gamblers at one of the larger internet poker sites, Ultimatebet.com, noticed that some of their opponents were playing extremely poorly, yet winning consistently. They suspected cheating.

One of the professionals obtained tracking data on one of the suspected cheaters, and after running the numbers determined that the suspect’s winning hand percentage was 13 standard deviations away from the mean percentage. This is equivalent to winning a 1,000,000 to 1 lottery six times in a row. The professionals took their findings to the licensing authority. Denyse, you’ll get a kick out of this. Most internet poker sites are licensed by a sovereign Indian nation near Montréal, Canada, the Mohawk Kahnawake tribe. The tribe hired a professional gaming expert to investigate, and sure enough there was cheating. One of Ultimatebet’s employees had gotten an administrative password, which gave him the ability to play poker at the site while looking at the other players hands! In all, the employee stole more than $20,000,000. Read the whole story here.

How does this relate to ID? The investigation was pure scientific design detection. Here is how the investigator employeed the scientific method to reach his conclusion.

Step 1: Decide on a question one would like to explore. In this case, the investigator suspected cheating, but it was just a gut feeling. The poker players among us know that in any given hand the worst player in the world can beat the best player in the world by pure dumb luck. I have personally seen a player win a hand in which the probability that he was going to win was only 1%. But blind luck like this succeeds only in the short run. In the long run, the better player will always come out ahead. Here, the investigator saw data that seemingly contradicted that maxim. A player (let’s call him Joe) who was playing very poorly, constantly taking foolish risks, was nevertheless winning not only in the short run, but also in the long run.

Step 2: Form a hypothesis. This was easy enough. The investigator hypothesized that the Joe was cheating.

Step 3: Test the hypothesis. The investigator gathered data about Joe’s history and performed a statistical analysis to test his hypothesis. He determined that Joe was winning at a rate that was 15 standard deviations above the mean. In the story the investigator is quoted saying, “Now, this sort of stuff just doesn’t happen in the real world.” In other words, the investigator cannot rule out random chance in an absolute sense, but as a practical matter, he is certain that Joe is cheating.

Step 4: Form a conclusion. The data indicate that Joe is cheating.

Acting on his scientific findings, the investigator reported Joe to the licensing authority, which performed its own investigation and found that Joe had in fact been cheating by using the administrative password to look at the other players’ hands while he was playing.

How is design detection in this instance different from the design detection employed by ID proponents? As far as I can tell, not at all.

Comments

Sorry about the formatting in comment 7. It's supposed to be: Barry Arrington:
How is design detection in this instance different from the design detection employed by ID proponents?
crater:
They were actually looking for, and found, the designer.
Searching for the designer came 2nd. First, they applied an empirical analysis that detected design—the pattern of wins vastly exceeded chance. That detection of design motivated them to subsequently search for a designer—the cheating employee. If someone arriving far in the future decided that the presidents on Mt. Rushmore was the result of chance environmental events, there would be no motivation to search for a designer. But if that same, future archaeologist concluded that Mt. Rushmore was a product of design, they would most likely be motivated to seek out the designer. If, during their subsequent search for the Mt. Rushmore designer, it was found that sufficient time had passed to erode the historical record they may never find the designer. Would their inability to identify the designer cause them to retract their conclusion of design? Design detection is not contingent on the identity of the designer.wdt_{December 1, 2008
December
12
Dec
1
01
2008
01:14 AM
1
01
14
AM
PDT}

Barry Arrington:How is design detection in this instance different from the design detection employed by ID proponents?crater:They were actually looking for, and found, the designer. Searching for the designer came 2nd. First, they applied an empirical analysis that detected design---the pattern of wins vastly exceeded chance. That detection of design motivated them to subsequently search for a designer---the cheating employee. If someone arriving far in the future decided that the presidents on Mt. Rushmore was the result of chance environmental events, there would be no motivation to search for a designer. But if that same, future archaeologist concluded that Mt. Rushmore was a product of design, they would most likely be motivated to seek out the designer. If, during their subsequent search for the Mt. Rushmore designer, it was found that sufficient time had passed to erode the historical record they may never find the designer. Would their inability to identify the designer cause them to retract their conclusion of design? Design detection is not contingent on the identity of the designer.wdt_{December 1, 2008
December
12
Dec
1
01
2008
01:02 AM
1
01
02
AM
PDT}

Barry, You wrote:
rib, your first response fails because your premise is faulty. You say that the poker example differs from ID because in the poker example design was detected, but ID has not detected design. How do you know ID has not detected design? You do not. You merely assert it dogmatically, as if that makes the assertion true.
Response #1 was actually a joke (it was clearly not the kind of answer you were looking for). I was going to put a smiley after it, but I decided that it sounded better deadpan. Nevertheless, I do think it's true that ID has not detected design because no ID theorist has created a novel method of design detection that avoids false positives.
Your second response also fails because of a faulty premise. You state, or at least imply strongly, that the probability of design can be estimated only if, in your words, “the probability distributions . . . are well understood and precise.” What utter nonsense.
Your logic is faulty. "q if p" is not the same as "q only if p". In other words, "chance could be ruled out because the probability distributions were well understood" is not the same as "chance could be ruled out only because the probability distributions were well understood."ribczynski_{November 30, 2008
November
11
Nov
30
30
2008
11:53 PM
11
11
53
PM
PDT}

How is design detection in this instance different from the design detection employed by ID proponents?
They were actually looking for, and found, the designer.crater_{November 30, 2008
November
11
Nov
30
30
2008
11:40 PM
11
11
40
PM
PDT}

Barry Arrington poses this question: How is design detection in this instance different from the design detection employed by ID proponents? ribczynski responds: 1. Because in this case design was actually detected. 2. Here, the question was whether the poker player’s success could reasonably be attributed to chance. The probability distributions for poker hands are well understood and precise, so the analysis was able to show that the player’s performance was overwhelmingly unlikely to be due to dumb luck. rib, your first response fails because your premise is faulty. You say that the poker example differs from ID because in the poker example design was detected, but ID has not detected design. How do you know ID has not detected design? You do not. You merely assert it dogmatically, as if that makes the assertion true. Your second response also fails because of a faulty premise. You state, or at least imply strongly, that the probability of design can be estimated only if, in your words, “the probability distributions . . . are well understood and precise.” What utter nonsense. Your error is easy enough to demonstrate with the Mount Rushmore example. Again, assume an investigator who knows nothing about Rushmore but the bare fact of its existence. There are two and only two alternatives to explain the faces on the cliff: (1) chance combined with mechanical necessity, i.e., wind, rain, etc. operated to erode the mountain just so; or (2) design (someone carved the faces). The design inference is both overwhelming obvious and correct. Must the design inference be nevertheless rejected because the “the probability distributions” vis a vis the wind and rain option are not “well understood and precise”? Of course not.Barry Arrington_{November 30, 2008
November
11
Nov
30
30
2008
10:16 PM
10
10
16
PM
PDT}

Thank you for making my point for me. You assign chance because you don't understand the probabilities involved.tragicmishap_{November 30, 2008
November
11
Nov
30
30
2008
09:46 PM
9
09
46
PM
PDT}

Barry Arrington asks:
How is design detection in this instance different from the design detection employed by ID proponents?
1. Because in this case design was actually detected. 2. Here, the question was whether the poker player's success could reasonably be attributed to chance. The probability distributions for poker hands are well understood and precise, so the analysis was able to show that the player's performance was overwhelmingly unlikely to be due to dumb luck. In the case of ID, the two main questions are 1. Could the physical constants in our universe have achieved their values without the assistance of an intelligent designer? --and-- 2. Can a given biological structure have come into existence through non-intelligent means? You can't answer question #1 without knowing how likely it is for our universe to have the constants it does. Without knowing the mechanisms by which universes come into being, it's impossible to accurately determine the probability distributions. The problem is exacerbated by the need to take the anthropic principle into account. If you can't quantify how likely or unlikely our universe is, given the assumption of no design, then you can't say how likely it is that the universe was designed. To answer question #2, you need to know how likely it is that a particular structure could have evolved via NDE or any other unintelligent natural process. As in the fine-tuning case, we just don't have accurate estimates for these probabilities, so there is no basis for design detection.ribczynski_{November 30, 2008
November
11
Nov
30
30
2008
09:20 PM
9
09
20
PM
PDT}

I've always thought that games of chance provided one of the best illustrations of the interplay between chance and design. Poker is supposedly a game of simple luck, yet some players succeed in the long run while others fail, showing that it's actually a game of skill. People appeal to randomness when they don't understand something. I have experienced this with games of chance. When someone wins a game of chance, the loser usually claims the winner was lucky. But the winner knows it wasn't luck that gave him the win. Rather, the loser would have been lucky to beat him, because the winner understood the probabilities and took advantage of them. The loser claims the winner was lucky because the loser cannot grasp the real reason he lost, so he must come up with some cop-out explanation. Thus the chance hypothesis is born. The more we understand biology, the less we will appeal to chance to explain it. Chance, not design, is the real illusion. "Chance favors the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur "Luck is the residue of design." - Branch Rickey http://www.playwinningpoker.com/poker/luck/tragicmishap_{November 30, 2008
November
11
Nov
30
30
2008
08:19 PM
8
08
19
PM
PDT}

Prev 1 … 3 4 5