probability

Every so often I have the pleasure of playing low stakes poker with some friends. Usually we play Texas hold ’em or some variant of it. It’s a tough game to play (at least for unskilled people such as myself), so often near the end of the night when we’re tired (or drunk), we switch to a much simpler game called Screw Your Neighbor. © Steven Depolo, Attribution 2.0 Generic [Read More]

A while ago one of my aunts posted that 3 of her Facebook friends were having a birthday that day. It seems like a remarkable coincidence, but is it? This observation is reminiscent of a well known problem in probability that yields a surprising result. The Conventional 2 Birthday Problem The conventional probability theory known as the birthday problem or birthday paradox concerns the probability that, given a group of N people, at least two such people in the group have the same birthday. [Read More]