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Waiting, waiting... (Posted on 2004-08-07) Difficulty: 3 of 5
You are outside a well known restaurant, waiting in queue, with 18 couples in front of you. You know there are forty tables inside, and you think an average meal will take one hour.

How long will you have to wait, on average?

PS. This problem comes from queueing theory, but you don't have to know anything about it to find the answer!

See The Solution Submitted by Federico Kereki    
Rating: 3.2857 (7 votes)

Comments: ( Back to comment list | You must be logged in to post comments.)
re(3): a thought | Comment 13 of 19 |
(In reply to re(2): a thought by SilverKnight)

I think you should consider that each meal takes exactly one hour to finish, and the starting time for each table is a uniform random random from [0, 1].  The number of freed up table for a given time, however, is not a Poison random variable because if T=1, the random variable becomes a definite number 40.

Edited on August 9, 2004, 9:04 pm
  Posted by Bon on 2004-08-09 19:45:29

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