Originally posted by Scott Jensen
Howard,

Also, I would assume the odds would steadily increase as the cut-off line gets closer and closer. Does that formula take that into effect as well?
I assume you mean the odds against getting the winning structure? I think what howard means when he says the odds are 2.1 x 10^-15 is that this is the probability, for any given generated structure, of that structure beating the current king. sooo... that means that on average you would have to generate 1 over that amount (4.76 x 10^14) of structures to beat 4.73 angstroms. hence howard mentioning that the amount of structures we actually generated to get that is several orders of magnitude lower (we generated 300,000 times FEWER structures than expected). a crude estimate indeed, but great that we are doing better than expected