A trading card series has 200 different cards in it, which are sold in 5-card packages.

Each package has a random sampling of the cards (assume that any card of the 200 has an equal chance of being in a package).

On the average, how many packages will need to be bought to collect the complete series if...

A: all the cards in a package will always be different

B: a package can have repeats

I ran a simulation. Randomly (computer rand()) picked 5 cards out of 200. I countinued to pick 5 cards until I had atleast one of each of the 200. The results for 10,000 tries:

(A) 232.
(B) 1131.

These are not nearly as high as I thought they would be.

Posted by Tony on 2003-01-24 13:39:11