View Full Version : How would I solve a problem like this?
donkeyradish
03-13-2005, 03:50 PM
This problem is simple to describe but I don't know how to approach the calculation.
How many rolls of a die would I need to make so that the likelihood of rolling each of 1,2,3,4,5,6 at least once, is better than 50%?
A more tricky variant of this sort of problem would be, how many games of hold'em would you need to play to have a 99% liklihood of having at being dealt at least one of each of the 169 hand types (13 types of pair, 78 offsuit and 78 suited hands)?
elitegimp
03-13-2005, 06:56 PM
bump because I think this is a good question but I don't know the answer.
I'm guessing there is no closed form answer, but for each of your two cases you could "guess and check."
irchans
03-13-2005, 07:13 PM
Skalansky showed (http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.gambling.poker/msg/a345d095a74ce41b?dmode=source) that you need about n*log(n/log(2)) tries to have a 50% chace of gettting every one of n equally likely alternatives.
For example,
1) you need about 1326*log(1326/log(2)) ~= 10020 hands to see all of the 1326 possible holdem hands.
2) you need about 6*log(6/ln(2)) = 13 rolls to have a 50% chance of each possible roll (1,2,3,4,5, and 6) of a single die.
gaming_mouse
03-14-2005, 02:47 AM
Let's calculate the chance that some number has not been rolled after n tries.
E1 = event that a 1 has not been rolled
E2 = same for 2
etc
We want P(E1 or E2 or ... E6)
Now P(E1) = (5/6)^n
Same for the other events.
So the first term in inclusion exclusion is:
6*(5/6)^n
The second term is:
(6 choose 2)*(4/6)^n
The complete expansion is:
(6 choose 1)*(5/6)^n + (6 choose 2)*(4/6)^n + (6 choose 3)*(3/6)^n + (6 choose 4)*(2/6)^n + (6 choose 5)*(1/6)^n
You can then try different values of n until you get an answer of .5. There may be a way to solve equations of this form, but if there is I don't remember it. pzhon or Bruce might.
HTH,
gm
donkeyradish
03-14-2005, 04:47 PM
Thanks!
Actually reading that thread I realised I may even have asked the wrong question
I said how many rolls of the die give me a 50% probability of rolling all possible values.
What I really wanted to know, was how many times should I expect to have to roll it to achieve the same outcome.
The answer to that seems to be a much simpler calculation, 6*H(6), where H(6) means the sum of all the reciprocals of the mumbers from 1 to 6. This comes to 14.7
Still, I can't completely figure out in my mind why these two questions are different!
elitegimp
03-14-2005, 05:17 PM
[ QUOTE ]
Thanks!
Actually reading that thread I realised I may even have asked the wrong question
I said how many rolls of the die give me a 50% probability of rolling all possible values.
What I really wanted to know, was how many times should I expect to have to roll it to achieve the same outcome.
The answer to that seems to be a much simpler calculation, 6*H(6), where H(6) means the sum of all the reciprocals of the mumbers from 1 to 6. This comes to 14.7
Still, I can't completely figure out in my mind why these two questions are different!
[/ QUOTE ]
the expected value is the mean, the probability = 50% is the median. The mean and the median are guaranteed to be the same in a symmetrical distribution, but otherwise no claim about their relationship can be made.
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