Ordering Dishes: Probability and Combinations

combinatoricspermutationsprobability

I'm struggling with the following question:
A restaurant has $5$ dishes, if a group of four orders from the restaurant what is the probability that $2$ people order the same dish and the $2$ others order different dishes from each other and the $2$ that ordered the same. (ex AABC)

My work so far is:

Total number of ways to order 4 dishes from $5 = \frac{8!}{4!4!}$

I'm having trouble figuring out how many combinations fit my criteria. Any help or hints would be appreciated.

Best Answer

The total number of different possibilities is given by considering that each one of the four people can choose any of the five dishes, independently from the other costumers. So $N=5^4$.

Now the number of choices you're interested in can be evaluated as follows. Let's label the four people as $A$, $B$, $C$, $D$. There are are $6= {4\choose 2}$ different pairs (the two people taking the same dish), explicitly $(A,B)$, $(A,C)$, $(A,D)$, $(B,C)$, $(B,D)$, $(C,D)$.

Now consider that the couple is $(A,B)$. Then $A$ has $5$ possibilities of choice. Once $A$ has chosen, the choice of $B$ is forced, since it's the same choice of $A$. Then $C$ has to choose one among $4$ available dishes and finally $D$ has $3$ possibilities of choice. So if the pair $(A,B)$ is the one taking the same dish, then there are $5\times 4\times 3$ possibilities.

To have the total number of possibilities with this sort of configuration we multiply by $6$, the number of possible pairs.

So the configurations are $n=6\times 5\times 4\times 3$.

Finally the probability is $$P = \frac{n}{N} = \frac{6\times 5\times 4\times 3}{5^4} = \frac{72}{125}\,.$$

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