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Concept
Birthday problem
Summary
In probability theory, the birthday problem asks for the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, at least two will share a birthday. The birthday paradox refers to the counterintuitive fact that only 23 people are needed for that probability to exceed 50%.
The birthday paradox is a veridical paradox: it seems wrong at first glance but is, in fact, true. While it may seem surprising that only 23 individuals are required to reach a 50% probability of a shared birthday, this result is made more intuitive by considering that the birthday comparisons will be made between every possible pair of individuals. With 23 individuals, there are 23 × 22/2 = 253 pairs to consider, far more than half the number of days in a year.
Real-world applications for the birthday problem include a cryptographic attack called the birthday attack, which uses this probabilistic model to reduce the complexity of finding a collision for a hash function, as well as calculating the approximate risk of a hash collision existing within the hashes of a given size of population.
The problem is generally attributed to Harold Davenport in about 1927, though he did not publish it at the time. Davenport did not claim to be its discoverer "because he could not believe that it had not been stated earlier". The first publication of a version of the birthday problem was by Richard von Mises in 1939.
From a permutations perspective, let the event A be the probability of finding a group of 23 people without any repeated birthdays. Where the event B is the probability of finding a group of 23 people with at least two people sharing same birthday, P(B) = 1 − P(A). P(A) is the ratio of the total number of birthdays, , without repetitions and order matters (e.g. for a group of 2 people, mm/dd birthday format, one possible outcome is divided by the total number of birthdays with repetition and order matters, , as it is the total space of outcomes from the experiment (e.g. 2 people, one possible outcome is . Therefore and are permutations.
Official source
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