Emptying the bowl when red cherries run out
Question
A bowl holds red and purple cherries. Amy removes cherries one by one at random and stops as soon as no red cherries remain. What is the probability that she has emptied the bowl at that point?
Short answer
. She empties the bowl exactly when the very last cherry in the random order is red. Each of the cherries is equally likely to be last, and are red.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
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