On Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:38:40 +0100, "scott" <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:

>> Strange, I've never wondered about it o_O
>
>Hehe, the exact problem I was applying it to was that I needed to save all 
>the possible images generated by some website, I knew there was a certain 
>number of possibilities and that it was random that each one appeared, so I 
>just wondered how many times I would need to try before I got all of them.
>
>I didn't need to know exactly, eg if N=100, am I expecting 150 tries, 200 
>tries, 500 tries?  But knowing the exact formula would be cool as it seemed 
>an interesting problem without an obvious result.
>

OK, a real world problem. I don't think that I've come across the need to work
out probabilities in RL.

>Another situation I can think of is if you need to check every item in a 
>physical population, but you can only select ones at random (eg tagging fish 
>in a lake or something).
> 
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than in my philosophy, Scott. :)
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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