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About Scott A Wilson
Expertise
I can answer any question in algebra, pre-calculus, probability, trigonometry, or statistics.
Experience
Experience in the area; I have tutored people over the years in algebra, basic math, and statistics.
I worked at The Boeing Company for over 5 years.
Education/Credentials: MS degreee in Mathematics from Oregon State Univeristy; taken well over 100 hours of upper division credits in mathematical courses such as calculus, statistics, probabilty, linear algrebra, powers, linear regression, matrices, and more.
I graduated with honors.
Past/Present Clients: College Students at OSU, various math people since college, over 700 people in math and calculus.
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You are here: Experts > Science > Mathematics > Advanced Math > Probability question
Expert: Scott A Wilson
Date: 5/8/2008
Subject: Probability question
Question
Hi,
A local scratch-off lottery works like this:
Out of 39 numbers, each day the lottery people randomly select five numbers.
The player selects five numbers.
If two of the player's five numbers match two of the five lottery numbers, the player gets a free game. (If three or more match, thge player gets money, but that's irrelevant here.)
The lottery claims that the player has a nine percent (approx) chance of matching two numbers.
This seems a bit high to me, but I last took probability fifty years ago.
What is the probability of having two of the player's five numbers match two of the lottery's five (out of 39 possible) numbers?
Many thanks,
Steve
Answer
I get a 10.4% chance of having two of the numbers correct and a 11.4% chance or better of getting two or more of the numbers correct.
I'm not sure who they have doing the statistics for them, but the real probability is even better than what they said unless the choice of numbers has more to it than what's been giving to me.
Thanks for coming up with a great question and here's another one for you: It only takes 20 people in the room to have better that a 50% chance of getting two birthdays together. This is since there are 190 ways of pairing people and 365 possible dates that the birthdays could match on, making the answer 190/365=38/73=52%. You see, nobody said which date, so the first person could be any date as long as the second one matches.
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