[Math] We have two boxes, in box #1 there are 7 white balls and 5 red balls….probability

probability

We have 2 boxes,

  • box #1 has 7 white balls and 5 red balls
  • box #2 has 8 white balls and 10 red balls

We pick at random one ball from box#1 and put it in box#2
then we pick 2 balls at random from box#2 and put it into box#1.

What is the probability that at the end box#1 will have 7 red balls ?

I know how to start solving this question but I am not sure how to finish it

$\Pr(\text{box#1 has 7 red balls}) \\
\quad = \Pr(\text{we moved W from #1 to #2}\cap\text{we moved RR from #2 to #1}) \\
\quad = \Pr(\text{RR #2 to #1} | \text{W from #1 to #2}) * \Pr(\text{W from #1 to #2})$

I am not sure how to interpret this into numbers

I would appreciate any explanation to this.

thank you,

Best Answer

Think of it visually. First you have the configuration

box #1 : w w w w w w w (7x)   | r r r r r (5x)
box #2 : w w w w w w w w (8x) | r r r r r r r r r r (10x)

In the first draw we pick a ball from box #1. Since it is equally likely to pick any of the balls we have 7 of 12 possible balls to pick from. We therefore get $$ P(\text{white from #1 to #2}) = \frac{7}{12} $$ We now assume that we succeded in picking a white ball. We therefore base our next probability on the condition that we had the event "white from #1 to #2" in the first draw.

Under this condition our configuration looks like this

box #1 : w w w w w w (6x)       | r r r r r (5x)
box #2 : w w w w w w w w w (9x) | r r r r r r r r r r (10x)

If we have a condition prevalent we always write that as conditional probability, that is what the bar in the other probability term means. We now draw two times from box #2 and each time we want to draw a red ball. Just as above we have 10 good and 19 total cases for the first draw from box #2 and 9 good and 18 total cases in the second. (This is only the case if we have moved a white ball to box #2 in the very first draw, that is why we use conditional probability)

To get the probability we multiply the probabilities for the draws from box #2. We therefore get $$ P(\text{rr from #2 to #1 | w from #1 to #2}) = \frac{10}{19}\cdot\frac{9}{18} = \frac{5}{19} $$ All in all we now get $$ P(\text{7 red balls in box #1}) = \frac{7}{12}\cdot\frac{5}{19} = \frac{35}{228}. $$