ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Cerf theory

Okay, so imagine you have a bunch of balls of different colors. Let's call the red ball "1", the blue ball "2", the yellow ball "3", and so on.

Now, imagine you line up these balls in a certain order. Let's say the order is: 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, and so on.

This is kind of like what CERF theory is about. It's a way of understanding how things repeat themselves in a certain way. But instead of balls, we're talking about events or things that can happen.

For example, maybe every day you wake up, brush your teeth, eat breakfast, go to school, come home, do your homework, eat dinner, take a shower, and go to bed. Then the next day, you do the same thing all over again. And the day after that, too.

This is kind of like the order of our balls. It's a repeating pattern.

CERF theory helps us understand how often things happen in this pattern. For example, let's say out of 10 days, you only brush your teeth 5 of those days. That means every other day, you brush your teeth. So we can say that brushing your teeth has a "CERF" of 2 - which means it happens every 2 days.

This can help us predict when things are going to happen, or help us understand how to make things happen at certain intervals. Kind of like how you can predict when you're going to get to 3 in our ball example: it happens every 3 balls.