401 probability/derangement.p
Description
This article is from the Puzzles FAQ, by Chris Cole chris@questrel.questrel.com and Matthew Daly mwdaly@pobox.com with numerous contributions by others.
401 probability/derangement.p
12 men leave their hats with the hat check. If the hats are randomly
returned, what is the probability that nobody gets the correct hat?
probability/derangement.s
Suppose we are handing out hats to n people. First we start with all
the possible outcomes. Then we subtract off those that assign the
right hat to a given person, for each of the n people. But this
double-counts each outcome that assigned 2 hats correctly, so we have
to add those outcomes back in. But now we've counted one net copy of
each outcome with 3 correct hats in our set, so we have to subtract
those off again. But now we've taken away each 4-correct-hat outcome
once too often, and have to put it back in, and so forth ... until we
add or subtract the outcome that involves all n people getting the
correct hats.
Putting it all in probabilities, the measure of the original set is 1.
For a given subset of k people, the probability that they all get
their correct hats is (n-k)!/n!, while there are (n choose k) such
subsets of k people altogether. But then
(n choose k)*(n-k)!/n! = (n!/((n-k)!*k!))*(n-k)!/n! = 1/k!
is the total probability measure we get by counting each subset of k
people once each. So we end up generating the finite series
1 - 1/1! + 1/2! - 1/3! +- ... +/- 1/n!
which is of course just the first n+1 terms of the Taylor series
expansion for f(x) = e^x centered at 0 and evaluated at -1, which
converges to 1/e quite fast. You can compute the exact probability for
any n >= 1 simply by rounding n!/e to the nearest whole number, then
dividing again by n!. Moreover I think you will find you are always
rounding down for odd n and rounding up for even n.
For example,
12! / e = 176214840.95798...
which is within 0.05 (absolute error, not relative) of the correct
intermediate result, 176214841.
Another fact is that if you set the probability of no matching hats
equal to m/n!, then m is an integer divisible by (n-1). That's
because the number of ways you can give hat #2 to person #1 is exactly
the same as the number of ways you can give that person hat #3,
likewise for hat #4, and so forth.
-- David Karr (karr@cs.cornell.edu)
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