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Home > Probability
Five Pins on a Board (Posted on 2023-09-27) Difficulty: 3 of 5
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?

See The Solution Submitted by K Sengupta    
Rating: 5.0000 (1 votes)

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Solution No Subject | Comment 1 of 3
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.

  Posted by Charlie on 2023-09-27 15:05:10
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