Hi all-
So, as I'm sure many of you here are also, I am a fan of xkcd. However, I've never read all of them. When I get interested and the time, I just click 'random' and read that strip.
A probability problem came to mind while I was doing this- right now, there are 650 comics. If I were to start with a random strip, and after that view a random strip, how many clicks of the random button will it take on average to view them all?
I have honestly no clue how to approach this problem. So I coded up a small C++ program to run trials. When I did 50000 trials and averaged them, I got 4789.12 clicks. If anyone wants the source code I can post it but I think that if you have a C++ compiler on your computer you're likely to have the knowledge to do this program just as quickly.
Is there any way to go about this analytically instead of numerically?
So, as I'm sure many of you here are also, I am a fan of xkcd. However, I've never read all of them. When I get interested and the time, I just click 'random' and read that strip.
A probability problem came to mind while I was doing this- right now, there are 650 comics. If I were to start with a random strip, and after that view a random strip, how many clicks of the random button will it take on average to view them all?
I have honestly no clue how to approach this problem. So I coded up a small C++ program to run trials. When I did 50000 trials and averaged them, I got 4789.12 clicks. If anyone wants the source code I can post it but I think that if you have a C++ compiler on your computer you're likely to have the knowledge to do this program just as quickly.
Is there any way to go about this analytically instead of numerically?