Five pins are randomly nailed to a square board (according to a uniform probability distribution), and a rubber band is stretched completely around them to form a convex shape.
What is the probability that the rubber band is in the shape of a quadrilateral?
This seemed too complicated to analyze, so I did the simulation over ten million trials (after debugging using 10,000 or a million trials each time through).
After randomly selecting five points in a unit square, the program tests each of those points for being a vertex of the outlining figure. It does this by taking the direction to each of the other points. It represents each direction both as it's originally calculated and also 360° higher so that the differences can be fully calculated all the way around. It places them in increasing order so that it can test if there's a gap of at least 180° between one pair of successive directions, which would indicate this is in fact a vertex as all the directions would lie within the other 180° or less.
hits=0; clc
tic
cts=[0 0 0 0 0];
for trial=1:10000000
for i=1:5
x(i)=rand; y(i)=rand;
end
ctV=0; % count vertices
for p0=1:5
wh=0; theta=[];
for p1=1:5
if p1~=p0
dx=x(p1)-x(p0);
dy=y(p1)-y(p0);
wh=wh+1;
theta(wh)=atan2d(dy,dx);
end
end
theta=sort([theta theta+360]);
theta=theta-theta(1);
f180p=false;
for i=1:length(theta)-1
if abs(theta(i+1)-theta(i))>180
f180p=true;
break
end
end
if f180p
ctV=ctV+1;
end
end
if ctV==4
hits=hits+1;
end
cts(ctV)=cts(ctV)+1;
end
toc
cts
trial
cts/trial
resulting in
Elapsed time is 279.890894 seconds.
cts =
0 0 1041764 5556342 3401894
trial =
10000000
ans =
0 0 0.1041764 0.5556342 0.3401894
where cts shows the number of trials giving 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 vertices respectively; trial shows the number of trials done; ans shows each of the counts divided by the number of trials. During debugging, when figures showed up with only two vertices, I could tell there was still a bug, as that has a probability of zero, all the five points lying on a straight line.
We expect half the shown digits of each statistic to be significant so the approximate probabilities are:
triangle 10.4 %
quadrilateral 55.56 %
pentagon 34.0 %
Initially I thought there was the possibility that the probability of a quadrilateral was 5/9, but results consistently showed a value slightly higher than 55.56%, rather than merely rounding to that from below.
A later simulation shows for 100 million trials:
cts =
0 0 10414959 55558557 34026484
trial =
100000000
ans =
0 0 0.10414959 0.55558557 0.34026484
triangle 10.41 %
quadrilateral 55.56 %
pentagon 34.03 %
It's on the borderline of significance for the possibility of the answer for quadrilaterals being 5/9.
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Posted by Charlie
on 2023-09-27 15:05:10 |