toshirohayate wrote: % != whole. :p
1% of 1,000 == 1% of 1,000,000 == 1% of 10. It's a percentage. o.o
That is not correct. 1% of 1000 is a 1/1000 chance whereas 1% of 10 is 1/10 and 1% of 1,000,000 is 1/1000000. I think what you're trying to say is that every single attempt is a 1% chance but the odds are that you will get closer to the median if you do it more than once.
To put it simply, if you had a 50% chance, you would expect to fail once for every 2 attempts that you made. If you tried 10,000 times, you'd expect 5000 successes. Sure, you can succeed every time or fail every time, but odds are that you will be much closer to 50% success rate.
With a 1% success rate, you'd expect 1 pearl every 100 tries. Yes, it can be more or less, but odds are in favor of it being 1 in 100. If you try 1,000 times, as you are likely to succeed once every 100 times, your odds of having at least 1 success are above 99%.