Expected smallest gap among 101 uniform points
Question
Draw points independently and uniformly from . What is the expected value of the smallest distance between any two of them?
Short answer
. All gaps between neighbouring sorted points are at least with probability for (shrink each gap by ). Integrating this tail gives .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Continuous Random Variables and Probability Density Functions
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
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