English

The "Monkey Typing Shakespeare" Problem for Compositions

Combinatorics 2019-01-15 v1

Abstract

Suppose that your mother gave you n candies. You have to eat at least one candy each day. One possibility is to eat all n of them the first day. The other extreme is to make them last n days, and only eat one candy a day. Altogether, you have, famously, 2 to the power n-1 choices. If each such choice is equally likely, what is the probability that you never have three consecutive days, where in the first day you ate at least 2 candies, in the second day you ate at least 5 candies, and in the third day you ate at least 3 candies? This article describes algorithms, fully implemented in two Maple packages, to answer such important questions, and more general ones, of this kind.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.04069,
  title  = {The "Monkey Typing Shakespeare" Problem for Compositions},
  author = {Shalosh B. Ekhad and Doron Zeilberger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.04069},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

15 pages. Accompanied my two Maple packages available from http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimhtml/kof.html

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:10:19.679Z