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Bascule's Book (Posted on 2002-07-03) Difficulty: 5 of 5
Bascule is reading a book. What is the probability that the first digit of the page he is on is 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5?

a) obtain an expression
b) approximate a numerical value

See The Solution Submitted by Cheradenine    
Rating: 2.7500 (8 votes)

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numerical solution | Comment 37 of 41 |
This partial solution is based on some assumptions. First that all the books in the world have a number of pages distribution that is linear. In other words, there are the same number of books with 1 page as there are with 2 pages, or 3 pages etc. Second that with very few terms, we see a convergent series (this is assured, as the lower limit for the answer would be .5, and the series is decreasing - however, assumong that you can see the lower limit is dangerous). Third that a book may have an arbitrarily large number of pages (I can't imagine a book longer than 9999 pages - the limits of writers mortality would begin to factor). Anyways, now that I've stated the assumptions to my solution, I'll have to post it in my next link

  Posted by Cory Taylor on 2003-02-12 10:19:22
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