medium puzzles
| medium | probability |
A postman brought N letters to a house with two letter-boxes. Since the two boxes were empty, he puts 1 mail in each of the two mail boxes. Then he chooses one of boxes with probability proportional to number of letters present in that box, and puts the 3rd letter in it. He does this for all subsequent letters. What is the expected number of letters in the box with lower letters?
This can be made equivalent to randomly splitting a deck of n cards into two parts. (n>2)
Suppose I have a stack of 2 black cards and one red card. Initially I put red between 2 black cards. Now I add black cards randomly between any two cards (so, initially it is either above or below red). Note that the probability that I add the card above the red card, when x-1 is the number of cards above red and y-1 is the number of cards below red is x/(x+y). Let the problem be: if red card is dividing the black cards into two sets, what is the expected number of black cards in the smaller section. So, we see that the two problems are equivalent.
Now this way, we are getting all possible combinations in which one red and n black cards can be mixed, we see that the probability that the red card is at height h is independent of h. So, the probability that the smallest box contains n/2 letter or 1 letter (or any number of letters between 1 and n/2) are all same. So, expected number of letters in the smaller box is asymptotically n/4