The teacher in a certain class room allows you to pass a paper with an assignment around, and whomever it ends up on has to do it. The only two rules are you can't pass it to someone who already has had it and you can only pass it to the person to the left, right, forward, or backward.

In a room of 30 students arranged in a 6 by 5 grid, the teacher starts out with the assignment somewhere on the front row of 6 students. At some point someone is stuck holding the assignment because all his neighbors have had it and passed it on to someone else. If this happens after every student in the room has had it, what is the probablity, for each individual, that he or she turns out to be the lucky winner of the assignment?

First of all, the problem doesn't state the paper is passed randomly. Therefore this problem is at the whims of the students.

As a teacher (sometimes with 30! students) I know how this would go:

There is some student in this class, possibly nicknamed booger, whom the other students will conspire to stick with this assignment. They can easily do this unless he sits in the front row and the teacher gives the paper to him first. If this is the case, the ugly girl with no friends will end up with it.

Cruel realities of life and all that...

-Jer

ps. what kind of cruel sadistic teacher (even a statistics teacher) creates an assignment and then only wants to make one student do it? I'd always make them all do it!!

Posted by Jer on 2004-06-24 14:30:38