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
