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What is the longest span of time possible between the birth of an animal and the birth of one of its grandparents? What is the shortest possible such time?
It is suggested that the distribution T_2 of the time between the birth of an individual and the birth of its parent could be modelled by
T_2 = 5 + 10 \mbox{U}[0,1]\,,
where \mbox{U}[0,1] is the standard uniform distribution. Do you think that this is a good modelling assumption? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Sketch the pdf of T and overlay this with a sketch of a pdf which you feel would more accurately model the time T.
Repeat this analysis for T_3, representing child-parent-grandparent. How might you sketch the the pdf of T_3? What problems would arise with drawing it accurately, and what parts could you plot exactly?
A chain linking the births of 10 of these animals will have some length T_{10}. How would you model the distribution of T_{10} if you used a uniform assumption of the time between birth of offspring and parents as in the previous part of the question? What would be the expectations and standard deviations of T_{2}, T_3 and T_{10}?
Extension work using numerical simulation
Use a spreadsheet to run 1000 numerical trials of a time period T_3. Once you are sure that your sheet works, extend this to make an experimental plot of the pdf of T_{10}. Do your results seems to make sense? What do you think the theoretical pdf might look like? What do you think the pdf of T_{100} would look like?