Futurama Question

[BruceZ]

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Vaguely worded question, so I'll just answer this: After how many seconds do we expect him to have only a 50/50 chance of not having blown up?

(198/199)^N = 0.5

Then round up to the nearest second, I come up with 138 seconds, which is exactly what LetYouDown came up with, so I guess that's confirmation.

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That's the answer to the second question I asked, but note that this is different from the question the OP asked. He is asking for the mean, while I was asking for the median.

[/ QUOTE ]I must have missed the word mean in there, heh.

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It wasn't there, but "how long on average does he expect to live" implies the expected value or mean, as long as there isn't any information to the contrary, though there are other types of averages. This is not the same as the amount of time that gives him a 50% chance of being killed, which is the median = 138 seconds. In fact, he has about a 63% chance of being killed in the mean length of time he has to live, which is 199 seconds.

[Neil Stevens]

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It wasn't there, but "how long on average does he expect to live" implies the expected value or mean, as long as there isn't any information to the contrary, though there are other types of averages. This is not the same as the amount of time that gives him a 50% chance of being killed, which is the median = 138 seconds. In fact, he has about a 63% chance of being killed in the mean length of time he has to live, which is 199 seconds.

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Guess I'm too used to non-mathematically inclined people who usually don't know exactly what they mean when they say average.

thanks,