Purple cherries left when the last red is eaten
Question
A bowl holds purple and red cherries. Emilia removes them one at a time in random order until the bowl is empty. What is the probability that exactly purple cherries remain in the bowl at the moment she takes out the final red cherry?
Short answer
. This happens exactly when the last three cherries in the random order are red, purple, purple. Reading the order backwards, that has probability .
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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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