Tuesday, 30 June 2015

probability - Birthday Problem without using complement

I have a solution to the birthday problem without using complements that is arriving at the wrong answer. I'd like to understand what I am doing wrong. I am not looking for alternate solutions to the problem.




Problem



Assuming there are only 365 days (ignore leap year), and each day is equally likely to be a birthday, what is the probability that at least 2 people have the same birthday in a room of N people?



Sample Space: 365N



Event Space




  • {N\choose 2 } pairings for people with the same birthday


  • for each pair, 365 possible birthdays

  • for remaining N-2 people, 365^{(N-2)} permutations which we can basically ignore (but still must be counted since they are part of the event space)



So I would expect the answer to be:



\frac{{N\choose 2 } * 365 * 365^{(N-2)}}{365^N} = \frac{{N\choose 2 }}{365}



With N=23, I get 69% chance of 2 people having same birthday, but correct answer is ~50%. So where am I over-counting?

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