Golf Balls in the Yard
The Data
The following data was collected by a statistics professor who lives
adjacent to a golf course and found out after moving that his back yard
was a prime location for receiving golf balls poorly hit by
amatuer golfers.
Golf balls are usually labeled by brand and with a number (1, 2, 3, or 4).
The professor was curious to know if each of these numbers was equally likely
among golfs balls hit poorly by golfers. (The fancy term for this is
"uniformly distributed".) Anyway, here is a tally of the first 500 golf
balls that landed in his yard:
| ball number |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
other |
| tally |
137 |
138 |
107 |
104 |
14 |
So what is the verdict?
Clearly the numbers 1-4 did not occur with
exactly equal frequency in this sample, but is the distribution far
enough from uniform to conclude that something besides random chance
is going on here? This page can be used to look at samples of computer
generated golf ball data under the assumption that each number is equally
likely. (In fact, it can be used to sample from other uniform distributions
as well.)