It's a Tie

Age 7 to 11

Challenge Level Yellow star

Jannis from Northcross Intermediate said:

"I think Kaia was right. The ties come out of the closet randomly. We know each tie has 1 eighth of a chance to be pulled out, so it's quite likely that the father will not wear 1 tie twice in the week. But it's random so there is a chance of him wearing a tie twice in the week."

Making the point that they're probabilities so you can't be sure.

Matthew and James from Stradbroke Primary did an experiment, and found that they picked the same tie twice in 9 out of 10 weeks. Ege and Onur from FMV Ozel Erenkoy Isik Primary School, Turkey, also did experiments, and you can find their results here and here .

Some people have tried to calculate the probability of picking the same tie twice, but none correctly yet. Here is what happened when we tried the experiment:

We found that there were:

6 weeks out of 20 when he wore a different tie every day (yellow), so the probability of this is 5/20,

12 weeks out of 20 when he wore the same tie twice in a week (green), so the probability is 12/20, and

2 weeks out of 20 when he wore the same tie more than twice (grey), so the probability of this is 2/20.

These are only approximate probabilities, and each time you do the experiment you will get a different answer. You can improve the approximation by increasing the number of times you do the experiment and adding up all the results as this will be more accurate.

Here are some some photos of children working on this problem: