Date: Mon, 8 Jan 1996 13:27:28 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: phk@critter.tfs.com (Poul-Henning Kamp) Cc: paul@netcraft.co.uk, jkh@time.cdrom.com, jehamby@lightside.com, current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Prognosis of 2.2-960107-SNAP Message-ID: <199601082027.NAA10320@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <867.821106165@critter.tfs.com> from "Poul-Henning Kamp" at Jan 8, 96 02:02:45 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > 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.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199601082027.NAA10320>