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'Last One Standing' printed from http://nrich.maths.org/
Many wonderful solutions have been received
and here are a few selected ones. Enjoy!
Anon from Horrington Primary experimented
with the simulator and arrived at an answer:
The mean average of this question was 10 for me on the
simulator, (I did 156) so I think someone would get heads more than
6 times.
Jacques and Tahmid from Wilson's School ran
more values through the simulator and got the answer
below:
number of spins till none left standing
number of people try
one try two
try three average
4
3
3
3
3
16
5
5
5
6.67
64
5
11
6 7.34
256
8
7
11
8.67
1024
17
13
12
14
If half of the crowd got tails each time though (the probability of
spinning a head being 1/2), then the results would be
so:
number of
people
number of spins till none standing
4
range from 3-4
16
range from 5-6
64
range from 7-8
256
range from 9-10
1024
range from 11-12
(margin of difference is for the last one standing)
The results we got practically weren't far from those in theory.
Had we done more tests, the results from the practical tests
wouldve been closer to those in theory from our results, we'd need
somewhere between 256 to 1024 people in the assembly to expect
someone to get over 10 heads in a row, though as you can see from
the results table, with 256 people, someone still managed to flip
the coin eleven times.
Vatsal from Wilson's School gave a clear
demonstration of the process:
On average after every turn half of the amount of people who were
there will flip again so in a way the amount of people remaining
will keep on halfing. So this is how it will go about.
250
125
62
31
15
7
3
1
Patrick from Otterbourne and Shaun
from Wilson's School gave a concise solution to the
problem.
If 250 people start tossing coins, then you can expect about 4 to
get 6 heads in a row. The chances of getting 6 straight heads are
1/64. The last one standing can expect about 8 straight heads. The
chances of 8 consecutive heads are 1/256. The chances of 10 heads
are 1/1024. You need 1024 people to expect someone to get 10
heads.
If there are 2 jackpot winners, then there are about 28 million
tickets are sold each week.
The chances of 3 people sharing their birthday is 1/365 squared,
not cubed. This equates to 1/133225 (ignoring leap years).
Derren Brown would take about 1024 tries.
Lindon from Wilson's School gave an answer
to the lottery question:
Lottery question If the probability of winning is 1 in 14 million
so for 2 people to win the jackpot about 28 million tickets would
need to be bought.
Jack from Wilson's School made a good
attempt to the rest of the problem
For the birthday problem:
The papers worked out the probability of all three children
arriving on a specific day, which is:
1 in 365 is the chance 1 would land on October 7th. 2 must be 365
squared which is 1 in 133,225. So 3 must be 365 cubed which is 1 in
48,627,125, as the papers reported.
But they reported it as the probability of three children being
born on the same day, when it is in fact the probability of the
three children being born on a specific day
The correct probability is just $1\text{ in } 365^2 = 1 \text{
in }133,225$ , as the first child can pick any day they want, and
then the other two have to pick that specific day. The papers
calculated the probability of 4 children
So with more than a million families with three children in
the UK, there are probably more families where this has
occured.
Well done to everyone!