[Doc HM]

Just bought a bottle of local cider from the shop which came with a promo comp to win a free Land Rover Defender. So I entered.

Turns out the competition (one try per bottle) is to match 10 random badgers with ten random badger houses to win. So, odds of 3.6 million to one (I think). Not exactly trying to give the landy away are they.

ps. If anyone wants to check my crummy math. I just went 10x9x8 etc which is probably wrong.

[ghporter]

The math needs more numbers. How many different badgers are the ten random ones selected from? How many different houses are the random ones selected from? I've found information (little bits anyway) about a Badger Ale contest-is that the one? There seems to be precious little info about this game on the web...

Anyway, a simple "select R things out of a population size P" setup is calculated:

Unfortunately that requires knowledge of the size of the population the things are selected from. The promotion is also complicated by having to match the randomly selected items to randomly selected targets. This gets past my understanding of combinatorics, and I'll defer to people that really know math to look at and explain that stuff.

[Doc HM]

As ar as I can work out there are ten badger houses and ten badgers. For each iteration of the game the computer selects a house for each badger which you then have to match. It's quite a simple process that results in odds so unbelievably long that it seems petty that they are offering a Land Rover, they could offer a Space Shuttle, confident in not having to pay up.

[Doc HM]

found this though.

Is this £30,000 prize impossible to win? | This is Money

which puts the odds at 6 million to one. Nice.

[turtle777]

Isn't that still much better than the odds of winning the lottery ?

Personally, I wouldn't even waste my time on that stuff, but hey...

-t