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arXiv · 1910.02515

The lost boarding pass, and other practical problems

Geoffrey R. Grimmett·David R. Stirzaker
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Abstract

The reader is reminded of several puzzles involving randomness. These may be ill-posed, and if well-posed there is sometimes a solution that uses probabilistic intuition in a special way. Various examples are presented including the well known problem of the lost boarding pass: what is the probability that the last passenger boarding a fully booked plane sits in the assigned seat if the first passenger has occupied a randomly chosen seat? This problem, and its striking answer of $\frac12$, has attracted a good deal of attention since around 2000. We review elementary solutions to this, and to the more general problem of finding the probability the $m$th passenger sits in the assigned seat when in the presence of some number $k$ of passengers with lost boarding passes. A simple proof is presented of the independence of the occupancy status of different seats, and a connection to the Poisson--Dirichlet distribution is mentioned.

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Geoffrey R. Grimmett, David R. Stirzaker. 2019-10-06. The lost boarding pass, and other practical problems. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02515

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