On 25 Jan 2008 at 12:21, Bernie Cosell wrote:
I've been fiddling with the recursion for the expected number of probes [without replacement] to find any of M specific values among N objects.
Just to clarify a bit, my "intuition" for the answer seems straightforward: if there are M items, you'd expect them to be about equally distributed, and so you'd expect to have to go, on average, around 1/(M+1)-th of the way to hit the first on, and on average M/(M+1)-th of the way to get all of them. [and so if you were looking for five items, you'd expect to go have to check about one-sixth of them before you ran into the first one and have to go through five-sixths to find them all]. I was just trying to see if I could derive that explicitly. /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--