10 Chapter 1 EXAMPLE A EXAMPLEB EXAMPLE C EXAMPLE D EXAMPLE E Probability How many ways can five children be lined up? ‘This corresponds to sampling without replacement. According to Corollary A, there are 5! = 5 x 4x 3 x 2x 1 = 120 different lines. . ‘Suppose that from ten children, five are to be chosen and lined up. How many different lines are possible? From Proposition A, there are 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 = 30,240 different lines. i In some states, license plates have six characters: three letters followed by three numbers. How many distinct such plates are possible? ‘This corresponds to sampling with replacement. There are 26° = 17,576 different ways to choose the letters and 10° = 1000 ways to choose the numbers. Using the multiplication principle again, we find there are 17,576 x 1000 = 17,576,000 different plates. . If all sequences of six characters are equally likely, what is the probability that the license plate for a new car will contain no duplicate letters or numbers? Call the desired event A; © consists of all 17,576,000 possible sequences. Since these are all equally likely, the probability of A is the ratio of the number of ways that A can occur to the total number of possible outcomes. There are 26 choices for the first letter, 25 for the second, 24 for the third, and hence 26 x 25 x 24 = 15,600 ways to choose the letters without duplication (doing so corresponds to sampling without replacement), and 10 x 9 x 8 = 720 ways to choose the numbers without duplication, From the multiplication principle, there are 15,600 x 720 = 11,232,000 nontepeating sequences. The probability of A is thus 11,232,000 P(A) = Birthday Problem Suppose that a room contains n people. What is the probability that at least two of them have a common birthday? ‘This is a famous problem with a counterintuitive answer. Assume that every day of the year is equally likely to be a birthday, disregard leap years, and denote by A the event that at least two people have a common birthday. As is sometimes the case, finding P(A®) is easier than finding P(A). This is because A can happen in many ways, whereas A® is much simpler. There are 365" possible outcomes, and A° can happen in 365 x 364 x --- x (365 —n +1) ways. Thus, oy, _ 365 x 364 x +++ x 365 —n +1) rrEXAMPLEF 1.4 Computing Probabilities: Counting Methods 11 and 365 x 364 x «++ x B65 —n + 1) 365" The following table exhibits the latter probabilities for various values of n: P(A) n P(A) 4 016 16 284 23 507 32 753 40 891 56 988 From the table, we see that if there are only 23 people, the probability of at least one match exceeds .5. The probabilities in the table are larger than one might intuitively guess, showing that the coincidence is not unlikely. Try it in your class. . How many people must you ask to have a 50 : $0 chance of finding someone who shares your birthday? Suppose that you ask n people; let A denote the event that someone's birthday is the same as yours. Again, working with A° is easier. The total number of outcomes is 365", and the total number of ways that A® can happen is 364”. Thus, pay = 3 365" and 364" P(A) =1- “ 365" For the latter probability to be 5, n should be 253, which may seem counterintuitive. ‘We now shift our attention from counting permutations to counting combina- tions. Here we are no longer interested in ordered samples, but in the constituents of the samples regardless of the order in which they were obtained. In particular, we ask the following question: If r objects are taken from a set of n objects without replacement and disregarding order, how many different samples are possible? From the multiplication principle, the number of ordered samples equals the number of unordered samples multiplied by the number of ways to order each sample. Since the number of ordered samples is n(n — 1)--- (n =r + 1), and since a sample of size r can be ordered in r! ways (Corollary A), the number of unordered samples is, naa 1)--@a=r+) mn rl Gon This number is also denoted as ("). We have proved the following proposition,12 Chapter 1 EXAMPLE G EXAMPLE Probability PROPOSITION B The number of unordered samples of r objects selected from n objects without replacement is (*).. The numbers (?), called the binomial coefficients, occur in the expansion @t+py =) (jai = In particular, "fn P= = (i) This latter result can be interpreted as the number of subsets of a set of n objects. We just add the number of subsets of size 0 (with the usual convention that 0! = 1), and the number of subsets of size 1, and the number of subsets of size 2, ete. . Up until 1991, a player of the California state lottery could win the jackpot prize by choosing the 6 numbers from 1 to 49 that were subsequently chosen at random by the lottery officials. There are (‘2) = 13,983,816 possible ways to choose 6 numbers from 49, and so the probability of winning was about | in 14 million. If there were no winners, the funds thus accumulated were rolled over (carried over) into the next, round of play, producing a bigger jackpot. In 1991, the rules were changed so that a winner had to correctly select 6 numbers from I to 53. Since (7) = 22,957,480, the probability of winning decreased to about 1 in 23 million, Because of the ensuing rollover, the jackpot accumulated to a record of about $120 million. This produced a fever of play—people were buying tickets at the rate of between 1 and 2 million per hour and state revenues burgeoned. . In the practice of quality control, only a fraction of the output of a manufacturing process is sampled and examined, since it may be too time-consuming and expensive to examine each item, or because sometimes the testing is destructive. Suppose that nn items are in a lot and a sample of size r is taken. There are (”) such samples, Now suppose that the lot contains k defective items. What is the probability that the sample contains exactly m defectives? Clearly, this question is relevant to the efficacy of the sampling scheme, and the most desirable sample size can be determined by computing such probabilities for various values of r. Call the event in question A. The probability of A is the number of ways A can occur divided by the total number of outcomes. To find the number of, ways A can occur, we use the multiplication principle. There are (*) ways to choose the m defective items in the sample from the k defectives in the lot, and there are ("ck) ways to choose the r — m nondefective items in the sample from the n — k nondefectives in the lot. Therefore, A can occur in (*) (""*) ways. Thus, P(A) is the