Splitting good and bad sweets between two boxes
Question
You have good sweets and bad sweets and must distribute all of them between two boxes (each box gets at least one). Your brother, blindfolded, will choose a box at random and then a sweet at random from that box, and you get to keep it. If you arrange the sweets to maximise your chance of a good one, what is that chance?
Short answer
. Put a single good sweet alone in one box and the other nine sweets in the second box. Then the chance is , the best achievable.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
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