Probability involving days of a week

combinatoricsprobability

Let's denote the $7$ days in a week as Monday=1, Tuesday=2, …. Sunday=7. Pick $N$ random people and the product of their corresponding birthdays' figures may or may not be divisible by $10$. Let's assume the probability of this product being divisible by $10$ for a given $N$ is $prob(N)$. What is the minimum value of $N$ for which $prob(N)>0.5$ and find this probability?

I tried a computations to begin with. I know that I would need a $2$ and a $5$ and the rest don't matter but I am not able to calculate the explicit expression and finding such an $N$ seems difficult to do as well. All thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Best Answer

Since you need at least a number in $\{2,4,6\}$ and a number in $\{5\}$ then you can count the probability to never obtain a number in the two sets or to obtain just one of them out of $n$ trials using the binomial distribution

$$P(\text{none}) =( \frac{3}{7})^n$$ $$P(\text{not both [case 1]}) =\sum_{k=1}^{n}{n \choose k} (\frac{3}{7})^n$$ $$P(\text{not both [case 2]}) =\sum_{k=1}^{n}{n \choose k} (\frac{1}{7})^k(\frac{3}{7})^{n-k}$$

So the probability is

$$p =1-( \frac{3}{7})^n - \sum_{k=1}^{n}{n \choose k} (\frac{3}{7})^n-\sum_{k=1}^{n}{n \choose k} (\frac{1}{7})^k(\frac{3}{7})^{n-k} \iff $$

$$p-(\frac37)^n-(\frac37)^n = 1-( \frac{3}{7})^n - (\frac{3}{7}+\frac{3}{7})^n- (\frac{1}{7}+\frac{3}{7})^{n} \iff $$ $$p = 1 +(\frac37)^n - (\frac{6}{7})^n- (\frac{4}{7})^{n} $$

You want $p>0.5 \iff (\frac{6}{7})^n+ (\frac{4}{7})^{n} -(\frac{3}{7})^n < 0.5 \iff 6^n+4^n-3^n < \frac12 \cdot 7^n$

The two functions (on the left and right side of the inequality) are increasing at rates so that when $n$ is positive they have just one point of intersection and after that the rhs function is always greater than the other, therefore it's not difficult through experimentation to see that $n = 6$ is the required amount of people.