Edit Problem


A outcome spaces and events
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Easy


A parent receives presents from their three children, Allison, Bobby, and Chelsea. To avoid disputes they open the presents in a random order. Write down a suitable outcome space to represent this situation. Then compute how many events would exist (taking the event space to be the power set).

Solution:

To keep our notations simple, we denote the gifts by the initials of the children. The space of all possible outcomes, the sample space, can be represented as a set of ordered triplets $\Omega=\{(A,B,C),(A,C,B),(B,C,A),(B,A,C),(C,A,B),(C,B,A)\}$.

Since there are 6 outcomes, the size of the powerset is $2^6 = 64$.


Additional Notes:

The power set is the set of all possible subsets of the sample space. To give you a few examples, the following subsets are parts of the powerset:

$\{(A,B,C),(A,C,B)\}$

$\{(B,C,A),(B,A,C),(C,A,B),(C,B,A)\}$

$\{(A,B,C),(A,C,B),(B,C,A),(B,A,C),(C,A,B),(C,B,A)\}$

$\emptyset$

To understand the formula for the powerset, think about constructing a subset of outcomes. For each outcome, you have to decide whether to put it into the subset or leave it out. That's 6 different decisions, each one with two outcomes, so the total number of paths you can take is $2^6$.