Some games of chance rely on tossing two dice. Each die has six faces, marked with 1, 2, . . . , 6 spots called pips. The dice used in casinos are carefully balanced so that each face is equally likely to come up. When two dice are tossed, each of the 36 possible pairs of faces is equally likely to come up. The outcome of interest to a gambler is the sum of the pips on the two up-faces. Call this random variable .
If all pairs have the same probability, what must be the probability of each pair (assuming that we distinguish between, e.g., “(1,2)” and “(2,1)”)?
Answer is 3 decimal places.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
1/6 times 1/6 =.0278
All 36 combinations equal .996 close enough to 1.
1 2 3 4 5 6
________________________
1| 2 3 4 5 6 7
2| 3 4 5 6 7 8
3| 4 5 6 7 8 9
4| 5 6 7 8 9 10
5| 6 7 8 9 10 11
6| 7 8 9 10 11 12
each pair has a 1/36 chance of coming up.
as for the sums,
2->1/36
3->2/36=1/18
4->3/36=1/12
5->4/36=1/9
6->5/36
7->6/36=1/6
8->5/36
9->4/36=1/9
10->3/36=1/12
11->2/36=1/18
12->1/36