Solution to Problem 236


Correct solutions were submitted by Paul Lee, Dan Dima, Flam', Burkart Venzke, Nancy Schwarzkopf, Juan Carlos Marivela, Brett Hendricks and Steven Prowse.


Let there be D days in the year. (It turns out not to matter if D is 365 or 366.)

The nth person in line wins if their birthday matches one of the previous customers' birthdays, each of which is distinct. There are n-1 previous customers to match, and D!/(D-n+1)! ways to pick a different birthday for each. If each assignment of n birthdays is equally likely to occur, then the probability that the nth person in line wins is thus

.

We want to find the n that maximizes W(n).

Notice that

is positive when n is less than and negative when n is greater than this.

With either value of D, this means the (n+1)st person is more likely to win than the nth person from n=1 through n=19 and less likely from n=20 onward, so I want to be 20th in line. (Unfortunately, I still only have about a 3.23% chance of winning.)

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