The Tuesday Birthday Problem

Posted by bumbledraven on Tuesday April 06, 2010 @04:59PM
from the alexbellos.com dept.

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Re:The Tuesday Birthday Problem by rhettinger on Wednesday April 07, 2010 @03:53AM (#1246731)

Python 2.6.4 (r264:75821M, Oct 27 2009, 19:48:32)

  >>> from itertools import product
  >>> twokids = product('B G'.split(), 'M Tu W Th Fr St Sn'.split(), repeat=2)
  >>> boytues = [t for t in twokids if t[:2]==('B', 'Tu') or t[2:]==('B', 'Tu')]
  >>> twoboys = [t for t in boytues if t[0] == t[2] == 'B']
  >>> len(twoboys)
  13
  >>> len(boytues)
  27

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Re:The Tuesday Birthday Problem by bumbledraven on Tuesday April 06, 2010 @04:59PM (#1245630)

For further discussion by Stanford's Keith Devlin, see http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_04_10.html

Author John Allen Paulos nicely clarifies the intuition behind the solution here: http://twitter.com/JohnAllenPaulos/status/11699672607

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