Highlander #15 - History Test.

[BrianD]

Little Johnny forgot to study for his multiple choice history test today. As such, he is going to have to randomly guess at the answers. Knowing that C is the most popular answer and A/E the least popular, he is going to weight his answer distribution. For each question, he will flip a coin 4 times. All 4 tails will result in Johnny guessing A. 3 tails, 1 head will result in Johnny guessing B. 2 of each will result in C. 1 tail, 3 heads is D. All 4 heads is E.

What Johnny doesn't know is that the teacher randomizes the answers so all answers A-E are equally likely. Every question will have 5 choices for answers. There are 100 total questions on the test.

How many questions will Little Johnny get right on the test?

Please PM me with your guess. The closest to the actual total is the winner. Everybody else LOSES! I'll run the game until about 7:00 Eastern time, maybe a few minutes later.

If any clarification is needed, feel free to ask here in the thread. As usual, I'll be checking the thread pretty much all day.

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Highlander winners to date:
BrianD #12, #14
Chas in Cinti #4
digamma #9
Mustang #8
Passacaglia #11
Pumpy Tudors #2, #6, #13
Raiders Army #10
Toddzilla #5
wbatl #1
Wolfpack #3, #7

[Raiders Army]

No clarification needed, but if he flips the coin four times, doesn't he have the same chance of getting C as he does A, B, D, or E?

[st.cronin]

Originally Posted by Raiders Army

No clarification needed, but if he flips the coin four times, doesn't he have the same chance of getting C as he does A, B, D, or E?

I don't think so. If the sequence mattered, then yes, but HTHT is the same as HHTT.

[Raiders Army]

Ah yes. My bad.

[BrianD]

Originally Posted by st.cronin

I don't think so. If the sequence mattered, then yes, but HTHT is the same as HHTT.

This is correct. Any combination of 2 heads and 2 tails will result in answer C. Only all 4 tails will result in answer A, etc.

[BrianD]

Afternoon bump.

[Barkeep49]

When is this over?

[Passacaglia]

I'm thinking, 7 PM Eastern time.

[BrianD]

Sorry, I got pulled out of town by my wife who wanted to go shopping for kittens. Posting results now...

[BrianD]

My goal was to make a competition that looked harder than it really was. By throwing in Johnny's goofy answer selection method, I was hoping to disguise the fact that he should still average around 20 correct questions. Judging by the answers, very few people were fooled.

Let's start by looking at the answer distribution:
A - 21
B - 18
C - 25
D - 12
E - 24
Not a very even distribution.

Now Johnny's answers:
A - 7
B - 29
C - 40
D - 20
E - 4
Near where they should be.

Correct answers:
A - 0
B - 4
C - 10
D - 0
E - 0
In total, Johnny got 14 answers correct. Nobody guessed as low as 14, so our winner is Mustang with a guess of 17.

Congratulations.

[Mustang]

I'll have a new one posted in an hour or so...