From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Mon Oct 28 2002 - 19:55:33 MST
> (Emlyn O'regan <oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au>):
> A question for LDC, a probability-competent individual, out of curiosity;
>
> It took me about 20 minutes to code up and trivially test my brute-force
> solution, and 40 seconds to do the run which got the final answer. How long
> did the calculations below take you to do? I am guessing that this is
> everyday stuff for you (remind me never to play cards for money with you),
> so I figure it didn't take too long. Our answers came out close enough that
> I'd call the two solutions equivalent (although I'd say 2-1 odds on a head
> is a little more marginal).
I don't have a spreadsheet on my computer at work, so I had to resort
to the paper-and-calculator method. Took about 15-20 minutes (it was
a slow day at work :-). As it turns out, I did make a small mistake--
the subtraction for the final numerator. Redoing on Gnumeric at home,
I get an exact final answer of 692336/1042380, or 0.66418. I was a bit
low, but 2-to-1 is still a good bet.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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