Just had a fun visit from a friend where in the middle of the card game he proposed this question.

If a restaurant has 10 tables and each visit you are randomly assigned a table. How many visits would you need to make to have a 90% probability of being assigned to all 10 tables?

 

Results:

I had just been boneing up on basic stats again … so needless to say we both rushed to our computers to model this question out.  Long story short … the answer is ~45.   Full link to how I got there here

 

Steps to Get There

I ran “Hacker Statistics” on this sucker … which means I decided to randomly sample 10,000 different attempts (trials) at visiting the restaurant and for each of these 10,000 attempts I recorded how many visits it took to hit all 10 tables

 

25 Visits is what we would most often expect it to take … but this doesn’t get us the 90% confidence

 

ECDF Chart below helps find the Visits needed to be 90% sure we would be assigned All Tabels

 

 

 

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