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!

Imagine there are 39 people waiting ahead of you.  Then the formula becomes 40/40 = 1 hr.  However this does not make sense because this automatically assumes that the last table started the meal right when you arrived.  This assumption is almost surely to be false as the time they began their meal is a continous uniform distribution.

Posted by Bon on 2004-08-09 21:55:24