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Re: Happy Birthday, Howard!
Posted By: Wes, on host 204.215.201.36
Date: Sunday, August 26, 2001, at 15:58:49
In Reply To: Re: Happy Birthday, Howard! posted by Travholt on Saturday, August 25, 2001, at 16:39:04:

> > With the birthdays evenly distributed, I'd say you'd need about 1678 people.
>
> Now, as I said, I don't know the answer myself, and I'm not very good at probability math, so I'd be interested in knowing how you arrived at this number ... (That's half the reason why I posted that question ... :-) )
>
> Trav"puzzles over his own problem"holt.

Actually, I cheated. And my answer is just an educated guess. I wrote a little perl script to experiment with different numbers. It's at http://www.theherezone.com/chaos/chaos2.cgi if you want to try it. The first box is the number of options, and the second box is the number of data points you want. The number that's printed out is the percent of the options that have at least one data point thingy in them. I just made the numbers really big, big enough that every time I refreshed and got new random data the answer was still very close to what it was the time before, and then I tested some more to check if I could simplify it down to only 365 choices and have it still work, and then I did.

Wes - "Yeah, well, cheaters sometimes prosper."

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