🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <93024.165953RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu> <RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu> writes:
>you see the results of a lottery drawing: n numbers, i1, i2, ..., in.
>what is the chance that the highest number possible in the lottery is
>k?

This seems more of a statistics question than a probability question.
You have a probability distribution with one parameter (k) and you
want to estimate the value of k from a set of actual data, using some
formula.  But you need to make some kind of assumption about the
distribution of k itself in order to ask your question.  Suppose your
formula gives k=29.  I would guess that k=30 is much more likely to be
the parameter for a real-life lottery in that case.

> also, what is the chance that
>there is no k such that k is the highest number possible?

I.e. every positive integer has a non-zero probability of being selected
by the first ball?  Then surely the distribution of this variable is not
uniform, unlike every lottery I know of.

>bob vesterman.

-- David Karr (karr@cs.cornell.edu)