-1

I have a interesting problem I'm trying to solve. I think you have to use combinations, but I'm not sure.

Here's the question: There are only 10 people in the world who are your match. A potential match has to be age 20 or over right now. The potential match has to be the opposite sex and must be single (not married or dating another person). You have 75 years to meet one of these 10 people. Given the following demographics, what is your chance of meeting one of these 10 people if you meet 1 new person from the opposite sex every day for the next 75 years?

The world population is approximately 7 billion. Approximately half are male and half are female. Approximately 66% of half of the population is age 20 or older today. Approximately 33% of the population age 20 or older is single.

Here's my work so far:

First, find the number of people you will meet over the next 75 years, which is just 365 * 75 = 27375.

The total number of potential matches is 33% of 66% of 50% of 7 billion, which is $762,300,000$. So this represents the total number of potential matches. I'm not sure how to set it up now. There's a total of 762 million people, and 10 of them are a match, and you meet 27375, so it seems like a lottery problem to me but I'm not sure how to set it up to find the odds that 1 of those 27375 that you "drew" was the winner.

Sabien
  • 625
  • added one additional simplification to get an estimate more accurate than simply "zero." It is rather on the order of $10^{-8}$. (That is not to say that my previous answer was inaccurate, on the contrary, it was just difficult to see what would be left after simplifications). – JMoravitz Apr 12 '15 at 15:35

1 Answers1

3

If we make several simplifications, including (but not limited to): none of your potential matches are in a relationship in the event that you actually meet them, none of your matches die over the next 75 years, in fact... noone dies or is born or ages into/out of the 20+ year/old age category at all... and the people you are meeting are all in the 20+ year/old age category that are singles and opposite gender (you hadn't specified that we were only going to be meeting singles, if you allow yourself to meet people in relationships or underaged people then it only makes the odds worse).

In other words, let us imagine if you will that you have the ability to freeze time and run around and meet all $365.24\cdot 75 = 27393$ people you would have during the timestop, hoping to meet one of your soulmates, just to avoid the issue of the life-aging-death cycle and relationship cycle of all people in the world.

Assuming we meet people only in our age category of 20+ year/olds who are in the opposite gender category and are currently single, and assuming that the probabilities for age, gender, and relationship status are independent, there are approximately $7\cdot 10^{9} \cdot .66 \cdot .33\cdot .5 \approx 7.62\cdot 10^{8}$ people we have available to meet during the timestop.

There are then $\approx\binom{7.62\cdot 10^{8}}{27393}$ different groups of people we meet, each of which we presume are equally likely. You have then $\approx\binom{7.62\cdot 10^{8}-10}{27393}$ different scenarios that will end in failure to meet any of your soulmates at all. The probability then of not meeting any of your soulmates is then $\frac{\binom{7.62\cdot 10^{8}-10}{27393}}{\binom{7.62\cdot 10^{8}}{27393}}\approx \color{red}{1}$. (these binomial coefficients are stupidly large, on the order of $5\cdot 10^{133641}$ wolfram

The probability of meeting at least one of your soulmates is one minus the probability of not meeting any, which is $\approx 1-\color{red}{1}\approx 0$


Because it doesn't help us very much to say "the probability is near zero", and arithmetic involving such huge numbers is horribly messy, let us approach this from a different angle in order to get a useful approximation for the actual probability. We make all of the same assumptions as before, but make one additional simplification: we allow ourselves to meet the same person multiple times. (This won't impact our number a great deal since the probability that we don't meet any person twice is $\frac{(7.62\cdot 10^8)!/(7.62\cdot 10^8 - 27393)!}{(7.62\cdot 10^8)^{27393}}\approx 1$)

So, this becomes a binomial probability distribution, with chance for success: $p=\frac{10}{7.62\cdot 10^8}$ and chance for failure: $q = 1-p = \frac{7.62\cdot 10^8-10}{7.62\cdot 10^8}$

The chance for zero successes in 27393 trials is then: $\binom{27393}{0}p^0 q^{27393} = 1\cdot 1\cdot (\frac{7.62\cdot 10^8-10}{7.62\cdot 10^8})^{27393} = \dfrac{(7.62\cdot 10^8-10)^{27393}}{(7.62\cdot 10^8)^{27393}}$

Expanding the top of the fraction via the binomial theorem gives:

$(7.62\cdot 10^8)^{27393} - 10\cdot (7.62\cdot 10^8)^{27392} + \color{red}{100\cdot (7.62\cdot 10^8)^{27391}-\dots}$ where the red terms on the right are insignificant in comparison to those on the left.

Thus, when we subtract to get the probability of meeting at least one match: $1 - (\frac{7.62\cdot 10^8-10}{7.62\cdot 10^8})^{27393}\approx \frac{10\cdot (7.62\cdot 10^8)^{27392}}{(7.62\cdot 10^8)^{27393}}=\frac{10}{7.62\cdot 10^8}\approx$ one in 76 million.

JMoravitz
  • 79,518