The Collision You Did Not Expect
Fifty days in, the last one is about how soon two things land in the same place. It is much sooner than it feels.
probability
4 projects
- 50
- 44
Fair to Things You Have Forgotten
Pick six items uniformly from a stream of unknown length while holding only six. The items you threw away had exactly the same chance as the one in your hand.
- 40
The Shape Decides
The convex hull of n random points has far fewer than n vertices. How many fewer depends on the shape they came from, not on n.
- 36
A Filter That Lies
A Bloom filter's false-positive rate has a famous closed-form formula. The formula is right about filters in general and wrong about yours.