Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: where smart happens him Marshall Brain with today's question, what's
Speaker 1: going on with the birthday paradox? You may have heard
Speaker 1: that if there are twenty people in a room, there's
Speaker 1: a fifty fifty chance that two of them will have
Speaker 1: the same birthday. How can that be? What it really
Speaker 1: is called the birthday paradox, and it turns out it's
Speaker 1: useful in several different areas, for example, in cryptography and
Speaker 1: hashing algorithms. You can try it yourself. The next time
Speaker 1: you're at a gathering of twenty or thirty people, ask
Speaker 1: everyone for their birthdate. It's likely that two people in
Speaker 1: the group will have the same birthday. It always surprises people.
Speaker 1: The reason this is so surprising is because we're used
Speaker 1: to comparing our particular birthdays with other individual's birthdays. For example,
Speaker 1: if you meet someone randomly and ask him what his
Speaker 1: birthday is, the chance of the two of you having
Speaker 1: the same birthday is only one out of three sixty
Speaker 1: five or point to seven percent. In other words, the
Speaker 1: probability of any two individuals having the same birthday is low.
Speaker 1: Even if you ask twenty individual people. The probability is
Speaker 1: still low, less than five percent, so we feel like
Speaker 1: it's very rare to meet anyone with the same birthday
Speaker 1: as our own. When you put twenty people in a room, however,
Speaker 1: the thing that changes is the fact that each of
Speaker 1: the twenty people is now asking each of the other
Speaker 1: nineteen people about their birthdays simultaneously. Each individual personally has
Speaker 1: a small chance less than five percent of success, but
Speaker 1: everyone is trying it simultaneously. That increases the probability dramatically.
Speaker 1: The next time you're with a group of twenty or
Speaker 1: thirty people try it. You might be surprised for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics because at housetop
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