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Splitting good and bad sweets between two boxes

Question

You have 55 good sweets and 55 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

13/1813/18. Put a single good sweet alone in one box and the other nine sweets in the second box. Then the chance is 12⋅1+12⋅49=1318\tfrac12\cdot1+\tfrac12\cdot\tfrac49=\tfrac{13}{18}, the best achievable.

Adapted from QuantQuestions.io; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.

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