Coupon Collector Problem
Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
If a package has one of 50 random baseball cards, how many packages do you need to buy to get a complete set? The expected answer is packages, where is the harmonic number . Switching from baseball cards to coupons gives the coupon collector problem: if there are different kinds of coupons and many of them are distributed randomly, the expected number of purchases necessary for a complete set is .
Contributed by: Ed Pegg Jr (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
detailSectionParagraphPermanent Citation
"Coupon Collector Problem"
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/CouponCollectorProblem/
Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Published: March 7 2011