having the same birthday is remote, many of us would expect this number to be rather large. However, it turns out that this is not the case, and hence the paradox.

A simulation of empirical testing and results was conducted to simulate multiple trials, where people of a given group size have their birthdays compared. The probability is consistently monitored and established as the number of successful experiments as a proportion of the total number of experiments performed.

Premise born in 19382: In a room of just 23 people, there is a 50% probability of two of these people sharing the same birthday, (ignoring years of birth). In a room of 75 people, there is a 99.9% chance of two people with matching birthdays. This is one particular case

While theoretical mathematical models and proofs have been derived in previous works outside the scope of this paper, the object of this paper is not to put the formulae into action; moreover the objective of this paper is to highlight a proof by example; i.e. that a simulation of birthdates for a group of people is analysed for this probability result, based on the aforementioned premise.

That there are only 365 days in a year, i.e. thus ignoring leap years. This also results in ignoring the suspension of leap day on years divisible by 100 that are also divisible by 400.

influencing elements such as seasonality are not factored in). Obviously in real-life, birthday distributions are not uniform, i.e. not all dates are equally likely.

One of the basic rules of probability: the sum of the probability that an event will happen and the probability that the even will not happen is always 1. In other words, the chance that anything might or might not happen isa l wa ys 100%.

If we can work out the probability that no two people will have the same birthday, we can use this rule to find the probability that two people will share a birthday:

Having (2) graphed in Figure 1 it is clearly seen where, at the probability of 50%, cross-referencing it with the number of people reveals a value of 23:

compressed by simply giving a single
equation and pointing the reader to a
reference whre more detail is given.

The simulation was written in the Java language5. A text file that lists multiple trials with the following parameters serves as input to the program, (defaults outlined here are geared to solving the problem in question):

In the case that the starting value ofN is less thanK, you should start the simulation withN =K. The reason is simple: How do you possibly find three (i.e.K) matches in a group of two (i.e.N) persons?

Beginning with group size ofN = 2 people, we initialise an array with the random birthdays ofN = 2 people; (the random number generator is being seeded with the current time). We compare every pair wise (number of

This will be repeated number of trials times with different groups of two people. If the average occurrence of two persons having the same birthday in these one thousand trials exceeds 0.5 (i.e. the probabilityP), the simulation terminates. Otherwise,N is incremented by group size

The flexibility in reading in values from a file that control the execution of the algorithm allows us to evaluate numbers of people for various probabilities and/or enumerate possible combinations of more than two persons, differing numbers of trials and matches, and check for shared birthdays, for example. A review of the Java source code in Appendix 2 should reveal other variations.

For each trial, a number of random birthdays are generated and placed into an array; (here, we use the Julian Date format, 1\u2026365). These birthdays are sorted and then iterated through to find the same values in consecutive elements in the array, denoting a success. Once the trials have completed running, the probability is evaluated as6:

With the availability of having an input file, multiple case scenarios can be generated. Table 1 is an example of sample data was available on the input file, (as per aforementioned format in Section 3):

The last record in this table is graphed in Figure 2. Preparing graphs for all records processed in this table (Appendix 4) reveals, interestingly, that time performance dips in proportion to the curve of probability when tending to 23 people, irrespective of the number of trials:

This research reports on asim u la ted empirical study of the Birthday Paradox. The findings suggest that there is a strong similarity between the theoretical and (simulated) actual probabilities. Specifically, that for any group size or number of trials, to achieve at least a 50% probability in solving the problem, we would need at least 23 people in a room for comparison (with previously unknown birthdays).

The input file allows for variations on the number of people > pairs as well as the group increment size to be > 1, as well as other terminating probabilities.

a match with any other person. An array of 365 elements would only be needed, and a random date only generated for each person until either the entire group size is exhausted or a match has been found. The author of

numTrials = any large number
currGroupSize = 2
currProbability = 0.0
terminatingProbability = 0.5

Check for match between consecutive elements: IF TRUE THEN numSameBirthday = numSameBirthday + 1
} END FOR
currProbability = numSameBirthday / numTrials
currGroupSize = currGroupSize + groupIncrement