ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Universality probability

Okay kiddo, we’re going to talk about universality probability!

Picture a big box filled with a bunch of toys. Now, imagine we want to know how many of those toys are red. We could take out every single toy one-by-one and count them all up, but that might take a really long time.

Instead, we can use something called universality probability to estimate how many red toys are in the box.

Universality probability is like guessing how many red toys there are based on patterns. It’s kind of like looking at a few toys and making an educated guess about the rest of the box.

So, let’s say we look at ten toys randomly from the box and five of them are red. We can use universality probability to guess that roughly half of the toys in the whole box are red.

This works because there’s usually a pattern to the colors of the toys in the box. If we randomly select toys, the colors we see are probably going to be similar to the colors of the toys we don’t see.

So, we can use universality probability to make a really good guess about how many red toys are in the box without having to count them all.

Isn’t that cool?