CSCE 411 Lecture 28

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Lecture Slides

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The Birthday Paradox

Suppose that there are possible birthdays (in our case, ) and people in a room. How likely is it that two of the people have the same birthday?

Assume that birthdays are uniformly and independently distributed over .

If person has a birthday , then are all of the birthdays of all people in the room.

Thus the event has probability

Let us calculate the probability of the event that all people have a different birthday. We are interested in the complementary event where 2 or more people share the same birthday:

Suppose that is the subset of vectors in that have distinct entries.

Recall that holds for all real numbers. Hence

Let's estimate the probability that .

This is the case where

Since

This is surprisingly often.


The Hat Game

players, each of them assigned a red or blue hat at random.

Players simultaneously guess the colors of their own hats. Passing is allowed.

At least one correct guess and no incorrect guesses leads to a WIN!

  • A player gets no information about his own hat from looking at his teammates hats
  • No strategy can guarantee victory

Easy strategy: 1 person guesses, everyone else passes

Better Strategy

For n = 3, if you see two different colors, say the other color. If you see two different colors, pass.

configuration Guesses
BBB RRR
BBR PPR
BRB PRP
BRR BPP
RBB RPP
RBR PBP
RRB PPB
RRR BBB

Probability of success is now 75%

However, there were 6 correct and 6 incorrect guesses (higher concentration of incorrectness in the edge cases).