The inspection paradox in stochastic resetting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The remaining travel time of a plane shortens with every minute that passes from its departure, and a flame diminishes a candle with every second it burns. Such everyday occurrences bias us to think that processes which have already begun will end before those which have just started. Yet, the inspection paradox teaches us that the converse can also happen when randomness is at play. The paradox comes from probability theory, where it is often illustrated by measuring how long passengers wait upon arriving at a bus stop at a random time. Interestingly, such passengers may on average wait longer than the mean time between bus arrivals—a counter-intuitive result, since one expects to wait less when coming some time after the previous bus departed. In this viewpoint , we review the inspection paradox and its origins. The insight gained is then used to explain why, and under which conditions, stochastic resetting expedites the completion of random processes. Importantly, this is done with elementary mathematical tools which help develop a probabilistic intuition for stochastic resetting and how it works. This viewpoint can thus be used as an accessible introduction to the subject.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".