#1467
Probability of a Two Boxes Having The Same Number of Distinct Balls
expert · 1205 · lc hard +32 · verified · 61% accepted · 297 likes · top 61%
Description
You have 2n balls spanning k colors, where balls[i] is the count of balls with color i. After a uniform random shuffle, the first n balls go to box 1 and the last n balls go to box 2 (both boxes are distinguishable). Return the probability that box 1 and box 2 each contain the same number of distinct colors. Answers within 10-5 of the true value are accepted.
Example 1:
Input: balls = [1,1]
Output: 1.00000
Explanation: Only 2 ways to divide the balls equally:
- A ball of color 1 to box 1 and a ball of color 2 to box 2
- A ball of color 2 to box 1 and a ball of color 1 to box 2
In both ways, the number of distinct colors in each box is equal. The probability is 2/2 = 1
Example 2:
Input: balls = [2,1,1]
Output: 0.66667
Explanation: We have the set of balls [1, 1, 2, 3]
This set of balls will be shuffled randomly and we may have one of the 12 distinct shuffles with equal probability (i.e. 1/12):
[1,1 / 2,3], [1,1 / 3,2], [1,2 / 1,3], [1,2 / 3,1], [1,3 / 1,2], [1,3 / 2,1], [2,1 / 1,3], [2,1 / 3,1], [2,3 / 1,1], [3,1 / 1,2], [3,1 / 2,1], [3,2 / 1,1]
After that, we add the first two balls to the first box and the second two balls to the second box.
We can see that 8 of these 12 possible random distributions have the same number of distinct colors of balls in each box.
Probability is 8/12 = 0.66667
Example 3:
Input: balls = [1,2,1,2]
Output: 0.60000
Explanation: The set of balls is [1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4]. It is hard to display all the 180 possible random shuffles of this set but it is easy to check that 108 of them will have the same number of distinct colors in each box.
Probability = 108 / 180 = 0.6
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