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Probability challenge
2010-02-18 01:54Yeah, I'm behind on posting news links and such. Moving on!
Given 11 people, what is the probability that 3 of the 11 share the same birthday? Assuming uniform distribution of birthdays in the population, of course.
This seems a lot harder than the classic problem of finding whether at least two have the same birthday. I debunked a couple of answers, came up with a nice one of my own for "at least 3 share, and I don't care about anyone else" which came nowhere near simulation, then someone else came up with an answer for "3 people share a birthday, and the other 8 don't share any birthdays" which matched debugged simulation, and that one's actually fairly easy in retrospect (in my defense, it wasn't the problem I'd been thinking about.) I still don't know why I'm so far off for the "at least" case.
Given 11 people, what is the probability that 3 of the 11 share the same birthday? Assuming uniform distribution of birthdays in the population, of course.
This seems a lot harder than the classic problem of finding whether at least two have the same birthday. I debunked a couple of answers, came up with a nice one of my own for "at least 3 share, and I don't care about anyone else" which came nowhere near simulation, then someone else came up with an answer for "3 people share a birthday, and the other 8 don't share any birthdays" which matched debugged simulation, and that one's actually fairly easy in retrospect (in my defense, it wasn't the problem I'd been thinking about.) I still don't know why I'm so far off for the "at least" case.