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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}}

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