Ticket line with no change in the till
Question
A ticket costs $5. Thirty-eight people queue for tickets: 19 of them carry only a single $10 note and the other 19 carry only a single $5 note. The seller starts with an empty cash box. If the queue is a uniformly random ordering of the 38 people, what is the probability that every person gets their ticket (and any change owed) in turn, without anyone having to swap places?
Short answer
. Treat a $5 payer as an up-step and a $10 payer as a down-step; the seller never runs out of change exactly when the path never dips below zero. The number of such orderings is the Catalan number , so dividing by gives for .
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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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