Talk:Birthday problem
usage of people
Why assume that the people choosen are alive? If dead, then "they" aren't people, but corpses. The task clearly states a group of people. However, even if dead, they still had a birthday. -- Gerard Schildberger (talk) 03:02, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
years in Algol
What does years signify in "%age of years with required common birthdays: 50.71%;" ? --Walterpachl (talk) 10:36, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
Meaning of precision
I’m not sure what “Estimating the error in the estimate to help ensure the estimate is accurate to 4 decimal places” means. My interpretation is that the of the estimated frequency is .
The of the distribution of each sample is calculated using the binomial distribution, so it’s is at most (for ). We are very near that value. In this case, if we use then the number of samples has to be .
Most of the examples use , so they don’t have enough precision. On the other hand, is to much, so I run my example in Racket with only , that gives a of only .
I think that the description of the task should ask for a clearer goal. For example: “Do the final simulation with at least 25000000 samples to help ensure the estimate is accurate to 3 decimal places.”