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Expected painted faces on a random unit cube

Question

The outside of a 10×10×1010\times10\times10 cube is painted red, and the cube is then sliced into 10001000 unit cubes. One unit cube is picked at random. What is the expected number of its faces that are red?

Short answer

3/53/5. By linearity, sum over the six face directions. For each direction exactly 100100 of the 10001000 unit cubes have that face painted, so each face is red with probability 110\tfrac1{10} and the expectation is 6⋅110=356\cdot\tfrac1{10}=\tfrac35.

Adapted from QuantQuestions.io; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.

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