Appendix 4: Probability
The study of gambling, specifically the throwing of dice, led to the mathematical field of probability. Probability is the study of how likely an event is to occur given a number of possible outcomes. A real number between 0 and 1 is assigned to each event where 0 signifies the event has no chance of happening and 1 signifies the event will always happen. You can also multiply these numbers by 100 to get a percentage that the event will happen. All the probabilities for all possible outcomes must sum to 1. For instance, the probability of a coin flip landing on heads is 0.5 or 50%. For tails, it is also 0.5 or 50%. Both of these numbers add up to 1. From these basics, this chapter will go over the probability needed in the study of quantum computing.
In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:
- Definitions
- Random variables
