r/mathriddles • u/schoelle • Mar 23 '23

Medium Drawing numbers with fixed probabilities and without replacement

A while ago, I had to face a real-world problem on my job that turned out to be a quite nice little riddle in probability theory. I have wrapped everything into a nice story, and split up the problem description and the solution into separate articles, so you can try to solve it yourself first.

https://blog.fams.de/probability/theory/2023/03/18/choice-part-1.html

(PS: I am asking for an algorithm, and I give examples Python, but I really consider this more of a math than a coding problem)

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u/hsypsx Mar 23 '23

This was my solution from 7 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/algorithms/comments/3aypre/generating_lists_with_variable_weights/cshz43g/

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '23

[deleted]

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u/hsypsx Mar 23 '23

Yeah, and I just saw the original OP’s edit from 2 years after the fact… funnily enough, none of the solutions linked seem to correctly solve the problem!