Browsing the archives for the Probability category
Question: You have 50 red marbles, 50 blue marbles and 2 jars. One of the jars is chosen at random and then one marble will be chosen from that jar at random. How would you maximize the chance of drawing a red marble? What is the probability of doing so? All 100 marbles should be […]
Question: Three ants are sitting at the three corners of an equilateral triangle. Each ant starts randomly picks a direction and starts to move along the edge of the triangle. What is the probability that none of the ants collide? Answer: So let’s think this through. The ants can only avoid a collision if they […]
Question: You have a stream of bytes from which you can read one byte at a time. You only have enough space to store one byte. After processing those bytes, you have to return a random byte. Note: The probability of picking any one of those bytes should be equal. Answer: Since we can only store […]
Question: In a country where everyone wants a boy, each family continues having babies till they have a boy. After some time, what is the proportion of boys to girls in the country? (Assuming probability of having a boy or a girl is the same) Answer: This is a very simple probability question in a […]
Question: The probability of a car passing a certain intersection in a 20 minute windows is 0.9. What is the probability of a car passing the intersection in a 5 minute window? (Assuming a constant probability throughout) Answer: This is one of the basic probability question asked in a software interview. Let’s start by creating an […]
