Re:China urges its people to struggle. Some say no
by a_conservative on Thursday July 08, 2021 @11:14AM
(#27773011)
If anyone is unsure of the truth of the parent post (like I was), I built a simple simulator in Python to test it for myself [0]
[0] https://pastebin.com/Et5CU3n0
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:China urges its people to struggle. Some say no
by nightcracker on Thursday July 08, 2021 @11:25AM
(#27773172)
You simulated the limiting case, where you don't stop having babies until you get a boy. That's (obviously) not realistic as we have a finite lifespan and fertility, but note that the
expectation still holds.
In this process you will always get 1 boy, obviously. But you have a (1/2)^k * (1/2) chance of getting k girls before your first boy. Thus the expected number of girls is
Sum[k * (1/2)^k * (1/2), k, 0, inf]
which is 1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Sum%5Bk+*+%281%2F2%29%... .
Re:China urges its people to struggle. Some say no
by a_conservative on Thursday July 08, 2021 @11:42AM
(#27773448)
Excellent point! I updated it to make the number of births per family a parameter. It's still an approximation of reality of course.
Here are the results when the number of max births per family is dropped to 2:
boys = 74861 girls 75166
boys = 74752 girls 75464
boys = 75047 girls 74933