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6 artículos
Probability & StatisticsGradoExplicación10 min

A Thousand Coins, Ten Heads in a Row, and 1024/2023

Draw one coin from a thousand, flip ten heads, and the chance it is the two-headed one is 0.5062. Both reflex answers miss, in opposite directions: ninety-nine percent ignores the bag, one in a thousand ignores the flips. Counting patterns gets the exact figure with no Bayes notation at all, and the reason it lands on a coin flip is that 2^10 happens to sit next to the size of the bag.

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Probability & StatisticsGradoExplicación10 min

683 Chocolate Chips for 100 Cookies, and Why 500 Is a Coin Flip

Drop chips at random into dough, cut it into a hundred cookies, and ask how many chips guarantee no bare cookie nine times out of ten. Five hundred chips, five per cookie on average, works about half the time. Inclusion-exclusion pins the answer at 683, a closed form you can solve on a whiteboard agrees, and the coupon collector's mean of 518.7 is the sophisticated wrong answer.

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