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Old 08-23-2002, 01:58 AM
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Default Re: 2 Dark Room Questions



Okay, Im going to have a stab at this, please remember I wasn't trained in mathspeak so this will be a) probably wrong and b) badly worded :P


To try to explain away the paradox Im going to change the problem a bit.

Say the maximum number of people in the room can be 1000 and any number from 1-1000 could be the number of people in the room.


Q2.The number is selected as random(random(1000))

these people dont know their numbers so the random outside the bracket is all they are working on, the odds that of the people selected, their number comes up in the top 4/5ths of available numbers is the 80% required.


Q1. The number is selected as 5(random(1000)

so we know our number is 5 and there are 1-1000 people in the room, we dont like this bet.

We cannot rely on the second random element to help our guess now, we know we are 5 from what we have to assume is 500.


What I am saying is that in my opinion the two things are not the same question , whether there is a way of using infinite series to work out what our is for an "infinite" room I wouldnt like to guess.


Something on a similar note. I believe that 30% of the time the number you are assigned will end in the digit "1" but cannot remember how to show this, anyone out there willing to put that to rest for me and solve this too?


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