A lecture on probability and controlling randomness may not sound like the ideal way to spend a Saturday afternoon, but my inner geek won the day. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it seemed that most of Cambridge had chosen to do the same thing and by the time I got there the tiny venue was packed and beginning to overheat. Half the audience was crammed into the back of the room, and most people couldn’t hear until the speaker, Professor David Spiegelhalter, was politely told to speak up.

What followed was mixed. The beginning, on the use of random patterns in art and agriculture, was a bit slow and the audience didn’t seem particularly enthused. Interest rose, however, with audience participation experiments involving faking the results of coin flips, how to spot fake results and a random colour pattern that turned out to be a Sudoku puzzle.

Spiegelhalter also discussed the likelihood of three children in the same family having the same birthday (higher than you’d think) and the distribution of lottery numbers. The short talk moved at quite a clip – it was difficult to get bored with any part of it, but the speed came at the expense of depth, and it would have been good to get a bit more insight into some of the issues. This was especially true for the birthday odds which had other interesting questions attached to it that were hinted at but weren’t made explicit.

The question and answer session was lively but did suffer from the perennial problem of audience members showing off their knowledge of the subjects discussed without asking anything resembling a question.

It wasn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon - Spiegelhalter was engaging on a topic that could have made for a dull lecture in the wrong hands. Unfortunately his good work was spoiled by simple errors on the part of the organisers.