Random wire joins forming one 10-mile loop
Question
Ten parallel wires, each mile long, have their left ends on one side of a wall and their right ends on the other. One electrician, who sees only the left ends, joins them up into random pairs; another, who sees only the right ends, independently joins those into random pairs. What is the probability that the result is a single closed loop miles long?
Short answer
. Follow the circuit from one wire. Each time you cross to the far side, the end you arrive at must be joined to a wire not yet visited: the chances are on successive steps (the right-side pairing can be taken as fixed). The product is .
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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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