Expected painted faces on a random unit cube
Question
The outside of a cube is painted red, and the cube is then sliced into unit cubes. One unit cube is picked at random. What is the expected number of its faces that are red?
Short answer
. By linearity, sum over the six face directions. For each direction exactly of the unit cubes have that face painted, so each face is red with probability and the expectation is .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
- Continuous Random Variables and Probability Density Functions
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