Hugh's copy of Theoretical Probability vs Experimental Probability

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Hugh O'Donnell

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Hugh O'Donnell 7 years, 2 months ago

Created this as a copy of Theoretical Probability vs Experimental Probability .

Name	Status	Author	Last Modified
Theoretical Probability vs Experimental Probability	Ready to use	Elliott Fletcher	08/05/2022 17:12
Hugh's copy of Theoretical Probability vs Experimental Probability	draft	Hugh O'Donnell	16/01/2018 13:46
Theoretical Probability vs Experimental Probability	draft	Xiaodan Leng	11/07/2019 01:59

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Question statement

Two unbiased, 6-sided dice were rolled together and the total of the numbers shown on the faces was recorded.

The experiment was repeated $\var{no_rolls}$ times.

This table gives the frequency of each outcome.

Total	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
Frequency	$\var{Freq[0]}$	$\var{Freq[1]}$	$\var{Freq[2]}$	$\var{Freq[3]}$	$\var{Freq[4]}$	$\var{Freq[5]}$	$\var{Freq[6]}$	$\var{Freq[7]}$	$\var{Freq[8]}$	$\var{Freq[9]}$	$\var{Freq[10]}$

Give any introductory information the student needs.

			Name	Type	Generated Value

die	list	List of 11 items
no_rolls	integer	80
sum	list	List of 80 items
Freq	list	List of 11 items
Freq2	list	List of 11 items
x	list	[ 10 ]
gcd1	number	1
gcd2	number	1
add	integer	-5
remainder	integer	8338

Automatically regenerate variables?

Name

Data type

Value

xxxxxxxxxx
 
[2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]

JME function reference

Description

number the die lands on in part a)

Describe what this variable represents, and list any assumptions made about its value.

Can an exam override the value of this variable?

Generated value: `list`

[ 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 ]

→ Used by:

This variable doesn't seem to be used anywhere.

Parts

Part a) Gap-fill
1. Gap Number entry
  Add
Part b) Number entry
Part c) Gap-fill
1. Gap Choose one from a list
  Add

Gap-fill

Ask the student a question, and give any hints about how they should answer this part.

Find the experimental probability of rolling a total of $\var{sum[0]}$ .

Enter your answer as a fraction.

Unnamed gap

Advice

There are two ways of assigning probability:

Experimental Probability is where you do an experiment, observe the outcome and record the relative frequency results.
Theoretical Probability is where the probability is calculated based on fairness and symmetrical properties of the results.

a)

To calculate the experimental probability (relative frequency) of an outcome we divide the frequency of the outcome in the experiment by the number of trials.

We are given that the experiment was repeated $\var{no_rolls}$ times.

We then need the number of times that the sum of the faces of the dice was equal to $\var{sum[0]}$ . From the frequency table, we can see that the frequency of rolling a $\var{sum[0]}$ in the experiment was $\var{Freq[sum[0]-2]}$ .

Therefore, the experimental probability of rolling a $\var{sum[0]}$ is

$\begin{align} P(\text{total}=\var{sum[0]}) &= \displaystyle\frac{\text{number of times a total of $\var{sum[0]}$ was rolled}}{\text{total number of rolls}}\\&= \displaystyle\frac{\var{Freq[sum[0]-2]}}{\var{no_rolls}}.\end{align}$

b)

When two unbiased 6-sided dice are rolled and their scores are added, there are $11$ possible outcomes: the total must be between $2$ and $12$ inclusive.

To work out the probabilities of each outcome occurring, we must be very careful about how the experiment is performed.

There are a total of $36$ different outcomes when rolling two dice one after the other; these are shown in Table $1$ .

Table 1
	1	2	3	4	5	6
1	(1,1)	(1,2)	(1,3)	(1,4)	(1,5)	(1,6)
2	(2,1)	(2,2)	(2,3)	(2,4)	(2,5)	(2,6)
3	(3,1)	(3,2)	(3,3)	(3,4)	(3,5)	(3,6)
4	(4,1)	(4,2)	(4,3)	(4,4)	(4,5)	(4,6)
5	(5,1)	(5,2)	(5,3)	(5,4)	(5,5)	(5,6)
6	(6,1)	(6,2)	(6,3)	(6,4)	(6,5)	(6,6)

Note that these outcomes are all different. For example, the outcomes (2,1) and (1,2) are not the same because we know the order in which the dice were thrown so we can distinguish between these two outcomes; when the first die lands on $2$ and the second die lands on $1$ the outcome is (2,1), however when the first die lands on $1$ and the second die lands on $2$ the outcome is (1,2).

The sum of the numbers in these outcomes is the same, we just count them as different outcomes.

Any one of these $36$ outcomes is equally likely to occur, so the probability of each of these outcomes is $\displaystyle\frac{1}{36}$ .

However, if you roll two indistinguishable dice at the same time, you can't differentiate (a 1 and a 2) from (a 2 and a 1). From your point of view, they are the same outcome. The probabilities of the underlying events (each die's score) haven't changed, but the outcomes you observe have.

In this case you have a total of $21$ outcomes; these outcomes are not all equally likely. There's only one way of obtaining two 1s, while there are two ways of obtaining a 1 and a 2, corresponding to two squares in Table $1$ . Hence the probability of obtaining two 1s would be $\displaystyle\frac{1}{36}$ , whereas the probability of obtaining a 1 and a 2 would be

$\displaystyle\frac{2}{36}=\displaystyle\frac{1}{18}.$

You can do the experiment this way, but it's easier when you can tell the dice apart.

Table $2$ shows the corresponding total of the faces of the dice for each of the outcomes in Table $1$ .

Table 2
+	1	2	3	4	5	6
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
6	7	8	9	10	11	12

For equally likely outcomes you can calculate the probability using the formula

$\text{Probability of an event} = \displaystyle\frac{\text{number of favourable outcomes}}{\text{total number of outcomes}}.$

Table $3$ gives the theoretical probabilities of each of the possible totals of the two dice occurring:

Table 3
Total	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
Probability	$\displaystyle\frac{1}{36}$	$\displaystyle\frac{2}{36}$	$\displaystyle\frac{3}{36}$	$\displaystyle\frac{4}{36}$	$\displaystyle\frac{5}{36}$	$\displaystyle\frac{6}{36}$	$\displaystyle\frac{5}{36}$	$\displaystyle\frac{4}{36}$	$\displaystyle\frac{3}{36}$	$\displaystyle\frac{2}{36}$	$\displaystyle\frac{1}{36}$

$P(\text{total}=\var{sum[0]}) = \displaystyle\frac{\var{Freq2[x[0]]}}{36}.$

$\begin{align} P(\text{total}=\var{sum[0]}) &= \displaystyle\frac{\var{Freq2[x[0]]}}{36}\\ &= \displaystyle\var[fractionNumbers,simplifyFractions]{Freq2[x[0]]/36}. \end{align}$

c)

For any experiment, as we make the number of trials very large the experimental probability tends towards the theoretical probability.

For this experiment, for example, the theoretical probability of the sum of the faces of the two dice being $3$ is

$\displaystyle\frac{2}{36} = \var{sigformat(1/18,3)} \text{ (rounded to $3$ significant figures)}.$

If we were to roll the two dice a very large number of times, for example $10000$ times, the frequencies of each outcome would be different.

The table below was produced by the recording the frequency of each outcome after rolling the two dice 10,000 times.

Total	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
Frequency	$\var{ceil(10000/36)+{add}}$	$\var{ceil(10000/18)+{add}}$	$\var{ceil(2500/3)+{add}}$	$\var{ceil(10000/9)+{add}}$	$\var{ceil(12500/9)+{add}}$	$\var{10000-{remainder}}$	$\var{ceil(12500/9)-{add}}$	$\var{ceil(10000/9)-{add}}$	$\var{ceil(2500/3)-{add}}$	$\var{ceil(5000/9)-{add}}$	$\var{ceil(2500/9)-{add}}$

This means that the new experimental probability of the sum of the faces of the two dice being $3$ is

$\displaystyle\frac{\var{ceil(10000/18) + {add}}}{10000} = \var{sigformat((ceil(10000/18)+{add})/10000,3)} \text{ (rounded to $3$ significant figures)}.$

This is very close to the theoretical probability, so we can see how the experimental probability changes as we increases the number of trials.

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This question is used in the following exams:

Numbas Workshop Anne by Anne Hurley in Anne's workspace.
CA Exam Week 7 by Hugh O'Donnell in Basis Statistics - Probability.

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Hugh's copy of Theoretical Probability vs Experimental Probability

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Hugh O'Donnell 7 years, 2 months ago

Error in variable testing condition

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Generated value: `list`

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b)

c)

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Hugh's copy of Theoretical Probability vs Experimental Probability

Metadata

Taxonomy: mathcentre

Taxonomy: Kind of activity

Taxonomy: Context

Contributors

History

Comment

Checkpoint description

Hugh O'Donnell 7 years, 2 months ago

Error in variable testing condition

Error

Warning

Generated value: list

Parts

Gap-fill

a)

b)

c)

Generated value: `list`