I need some MeFi experts to help me calculate the odds of something happening.
A friend just had a gender reveal for her child, where she had an array of 16 black balloons arranged in a 4 x 4 grid, and had friends take turns throwing a dart at them. The balloons were filled with multi-colored glitter, except for the gender reveal balloon that contained pink glitter. Now it would be not as interesting if someone broke the pink glitter balloon on the first try, since you want suspense for this event, but as it turned out, all the other balloons were popped first, and the pink was the last one remaining. So it worked out well, with lots of audience reaction after each pop, but I wondered how unusual it was for this to happen. The odds of hitting the pink balloon on the first throw are 1 in 16, but it becomes more likely to hit as the others are popped. So tell me the odds, i.e., the number of times one would have to recreate this event before you could duplicate leaving the one special balloon in 16 to the very last, given random dart throws. |
Video
Web
Image
Music
BlogU
