From owner-freebsd-current Mon Jan 8 12:35:16 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id MAA04709 for current-outgoing; Mon, 8 Jan 1996 12:35:16 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id MAA04697 for ; Mon, 8 Jan 1996 12:35:11 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id NAA10320; Mon, 8 Jan 1996 13:27:28 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199601082027.NAA10320@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Prognosis of 2.2-960107-SNAP To: phk@critter.tfs.com (Poul-Henning Kamp) Date: Mon, 8 Jan 1996 13:27:28 -0700 (MST) Cc: paul@netcraft.co.uk, jkh@time.cdrom.com, jehamby@lightside.com, current@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <867.821106165@critter.tfs.com> from "Poul-Henning Kamp" at Jan 8, 96 02:02:45 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Isn't there some mathematical puzzle that says something like, you > > only need 27 people in a room for one of them to have a birthday the > > same day as yours? Given the numbers we have, we've probably got > > every day covered. > > It's not a puzzle, it's probability, and yes it is true, around > 25 the probability goes above 50%. But it's not a guarantee. I think the formalism is "two of the people in the room will have the same birthday" -- ie: your particular birthday isn't special. I loved putting this to a test once (I happened to know the majority of the people in the room) when someone didn't understand the difference between ontology and epistimology and stated as a "fact" that there would be two people with the same birthday. There weren't. It wasn't an impossibility for this to be the case, merely an improbability. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.