I talked about an interesting problem in this post. I had onsite-inteviews from Wolfram at the end of April this year, and I decided to talk how to solve the problem using Mathematica. I did some research and realized that the problem is a well-known one which is called the …
Stick Breaking Problems
The following is a popular brain teaser problem about probability.
Randomly select two points on a unit stick to break it into 3 pieces, what is the probability that the 3 pieces can form a triangle?
The critical thing here is how are the two points selected. The most popular …
What are the Two Integers?
I met a friend majored in math on a bus home today. He held a piece of paper with a question (probably an interview question since he is trying to find a job recently). He asked the question to me and I found it to be an interesting one.
A …
Probability to Get a Complete Deck of Cards?
Suppose a poker games requires 4 decks of poker. After the game, the cards are put back into the 4 decks randomly. Now there is another game which requires only 1 deck of poker, so we want to open some decks of the poker and find a complete set of …
Chance to Take One's Own Seat?
There are \(N\) seats on a plane. Suppose the first passengers is drunk and he takes a seat randomly. For each of the other passengers, if his/her seat is not taken by other people, then he/she sits on his/her own seat, otherwise he/she takes a seat …
Sun Bin PK Pang Juan
Dating back to the time when I was a sophomore, I read a very interesting problem from "Waming", which is a magazine of math department of USTC (University of Science and Technology of China).
One day Guigu Zi (a famous ancient Chinese sophist, the teacher of Sun Bin and Pang …