Photo:
THE MIRROR
The vegetable market comes to life early in the morning.
Forklifts scurry back and forth, orders from supermarkets, restaurants and cafeterias are being processed.
The fresh goods are then loaded into 100 vans, which take over the distribution in the city and the surrounding area.
The 100 transporters are numbered from 1 to 100.
You park in a long row next to each other in front of the huge market hall.
During the day they gradually return from their tours.
The vans do not have a fixed parking space.
Rather, the drivers park them next to each other, starting from the left.
Theoretically, all 100 vans would return from their tour at the same time, but traffic jams and other delays ensure that the order of arrival is random - and thus also the respective parking space.
What is the probability that the numbers of the first three transporters on the left form an increasing sequence?
An example of this would be the numbers 26, 65 and 81.
The probability is
1/6
.
The solution is simpler than you think.
We're just looking at the three vans on the far left.
These have three different numbers.
One is the smallest number, one is the middle, and one is the largest.
For the sake of simplicity we call the three numbers 1, 2 and 3. Since the order of these three cars is also random, the following six arrangements are possible:
123
132
213
231
312
321
Only in the first combination do the numbers form an increasing sequence.
So the probability we are looking for is 1/6.
I discovered this riddle on Twitter.
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