Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Hash collisions and a little maths

Author: Kai Lübke

Date: 04:46:53 02/18/99

Go up one level in this thread


On February 18, 1999 at 07:19:43, Jouni Uski wrote:

>If You select random 23 people, it's over 50% probability that two have exact
>same birth day (from 365 possibility)! This seems to be against common sense.

Depends on how you look at it. If you take one of them fixed, then the
probability that one of the other 22 has the same birthday is of course 22/365,
less than 10%.
But the case here of course is the question whether *any* of them have the same
birthday.
So you have a probability of 22/365 for the first person's birthday to conincide
with any of the others, for the second person the prob. is 21/365 (as we need
not compare with #1 again), for the third 20/365 and so  on.
So the overall probability is (22+21+...+2+1)/365 = 253/365 >50%.

---
Shep



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.