Saturday, February 16, 2013

Points on a semi-circle


Suppose you choose $N$ points uniformly randomly on a circle. What is the probability that all the points lie on a semi-circle.

1 comment:

  1. A nice solution was proposed by Raghav Agrawal -

    The probability that all the N points lie on a semi-circle is the same as the probability that the rest $(n-1)$ points lie on an arc of width $\pi$ in the clockwise direction from the first point which can be $1,2, ..., N$. Now, since the individual events are exclusive, we have,

    $
    P = n \times \frac{1}{2^{n-1}}
    $

    ReplyDelete