Monday, May 24, 2010

SIMC opening ceremony, 1.5hrs. Going to school 1.5hrs, going back home 1.5hrs.

School came up wif weird ideas again, lolz. The dot on the "i" was a big red button -.-. (Last time they launched a book, launch here takes both meanings, they had a catapult in the audi, and they sold copies of the book later)

Anyway, the math prof was the guest of honour, and he gave us a problem:

You are given 100 envelopes, each of them contains an amount of money. The envelopes are randomly arranged and given to you one by one. For each envelope, you open it and look at the amount inside. Then you decide if you want to move on to the next envelope or just take the sum and walk away. You may not touch the envelopes you've decided to reject anymore.

Qn: Find a way to maximise the amount you can get from this situation.

Solution: Its quite weird.:
Take the sample size, in this case ur number of envelopes, which is 100. Divide this by Euler's number, e = 2.71..... This number in this case should be round 37. So, you reject the first 37 envelopes. Then after that, as long as you find a envelope containing more money than any of the 37, you accept that envelope.

This is supposed to be the optimum way to do this and would give you the best chance of getting as much money as possible, but it does not assure that you do. I have no idea how it works though.

Sianz ppl | 9:31:00 pm
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