41–50 of 65 posts
Classic stack overflow, top answer is a giant mass of "look how awesome I am!" sensible answer is 3 down with half as many upvotes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While that's a nice way to approach a mathematical problem, it does not take into account the social aspects of the problem. For example, it used to be (and perhaps still is?) quite common for families to aspire to have a boy and therefore have another child when they have a girl, but not when they have a boy. Interestingly, these sort of things are much easier to model empirically the way you did (all you would need…
Well, it was posted in probability and not is some social science board. So I thought it was safe to assume a purely mathematical question. Not that I can answer it...
With the assumptions that 1) boy/girl is always random but 50/50, and 2) people are choosing to have 1-10 kids ahead of time and going for it (that's how people plan their families, right?), girls do have very slightly more brothers than boys. The notebook below shows a simulation of 50k towns of 100 families. It also holds for different max numbers of children and more families. https://gist.github.com/rcarneva/7baa…
What a great example of a seemingly simple question that can't be answered. The question sounds like an elegant and abstract question straight out of a mathematical textbook, but to answer it you need to start making assumptions about the the distribution of family sizes, which leads you to family planning and cultural differences. There is no way to solve this problem on a napkin. Why does everyone try to solve this…
Classic stack overflow, top answer is a giant mass of "look how awesome I am!" sensible answer is 3 down with half as many upvotes.
That's one of my productivity secrets. Always read the top 4 answers before deciding on a course. Answer #3 is right far too often for my liking. And sometimes answer #4 brings up corner cases the others missed.
The question was phrased ambiguously as "do men or women have more brothers." Here's three possible interpretations. One interpretation is "if I am the last born (or some other gender-neutral specifier), do I have more brothers if I am a man or a woman?" As paulmd answers, the chances are even. But we can also interpret it at the aggregate level. Say we have a family with M men and W women, and we decide to count bro…
I chose to answer the question empirically. http://pastebin.com/1g1bAEPt Turns out it's equal.
I chose to answer the question empirically. http://pastebin.com/1g1bAEPt Turns out it's equal.
I think you forgot to put quotes around "Girl" on line 46. Edit: Actually I'm not sure what the problem is but I'm getting 0 girls and a divide-by-0 error. Edit2: I don't remember why I was getting all girls, but the other issue was integer division. If boybrothers/boys truncates to 0, then (girlbrothers/girls)/(boybrothers/boys) will divide by 0.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you forgot to put quotes around "Girl" on line 46. Edit: Actually I'm not sure what the problem is but I'm getting 0 girls and a divide-by-0 error. Edit2: I don't remember why I was getting all girls, but the other issue was integer division. If boybrothers/boys truncates to 0, then (girlbrothers/girls)/(boybrothers/boys) will divide by 0.
Run it in Python 3.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one of my productivity secrets. Always read the top 4 answers before deciding on a course. Answer #3 is right far too often for my liking. And sometimes answer #4 brings up corner cases the others missed.
I think the above structure is eerily reflected in large corporations and in government. The actual work/know-how resides in tier 3 and 4, with the top two tiers actually just being better at politics and self promotion.