All Questions
Tagged with expectation recreational-mathematics
8 questions
-1
votes
1
answer
80
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Seating assignment inspired question
Motivation. Recently I stayed at a hotel which had the curious custom to ask their $n$ parties (group of guests, most parties a married couple) which of the $n$ tables they wanted to take. Of course ...
- 48.8k
1
vote
0
answers
107
views
Expected value of maximal cycle length in fixed-point free bijections
$\newcommand{\n}{\{1,\ldots,n\}}$
$\newcommand{\FF}{\text{FF}}$
$\newcommand{\lc}{\text{lc}}$
Motivation. A group of my son's peers decided to have a few days of Secret Santa before last year's ...
- 48.8k
2
votes
1
answer
387
views
Expected value of attempts needed to find a "pair" of cards
We are given an integer $n \geq 1$ and $2n$ cards, labelled $0$ to $2n-1$. We pick a card with uniform probability, put it back, and continue, until for some $k\in \{0,n-1\}$ the cards
$2k$ and $2k+1$ ...
- 48.8k
4
votes
1
answer
222
views
Memory game inspired problem
Motivation. As I was playing the pairs-matching game "Memory" (known as "Concentration" in some parts of the world) with my children, I was surprised that even thorough shuffling ...
- 48.8k
12
votes
4
answers
2k
views
Throwing a fair die until most recent roll is smaller than previous one
I roll a fair die with $n>1$ sides until the most recent roll is smaller than the previous one. Let $E_n$ be the expected number of rolls. Do we have $\lim_{n\to\infty} E_n < \infty$? If not, ...
- 48.8k
10
votes
2
answers
270
views
Maximal in-degree in directed voting graph
Real-life motivation. Our team has $n$ members. For the next in-team presentation session, everyone had 1 talk prepared that he or she would be able to present. Now everyone could cast $1$ vote about ...
- 48.8k
3
votes
2
answers
235
views
Expected value of length of interval game
I have a die that produces uniformly distributed values in $\{1,\ldots, k\}$ for some integer $k\geq 2$. Now I play the following game.
I start rolling the die and produce one integer in $\{1,\ldots,...
- 48.8k
4
votes
3
answers
205
views
Expected distance of nearest matching pair in the game of pairs
Recently I was playing several rounds of the game of pairs with my children. I was surprised that almost every time, one matching pair was adjacent (either next to each other in a row, or vertically). ...
- 48.8k