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

(In reply to re: First Steps? by friedlinguini)

Combining this with what jim has said... are we dealing with an ideal case where a book is equally likely to have any number of pages (up to infinity) or are we looking at a situation where a book's page count is represented by a standard distribution?

In the ideal case, it seems that the answer would run into a wall since then p(n) would be one over infinity for any single value of n. (Yes, that's ALMOST zero, Dulanjana :)

And of course we would have an infinite series of these.

On the other hand, I highly doubt that the problem calls for using real-world data about how many pages a random book is likely to have...

Posted by levik on 2002-07-03 14:26:32