Statistics And Probability Question 543

Question: Forty teams play a tournament. Each team plays every other team just once. Each game results in a win for one team. If each team has a 50% chance of winning each game, the probability that at the end of the tournament, every team has won a different number of games is

Options:

A) $ 1/780 $

B) $ 40!/2^{780} $

C) $ 40!/3^{780} $

D) none of these

Show Answer

Answer:

Correct Answer: B

Solution:

  • [b] Team totals must be 0, 1, 2,?39, Let the teams be $ T_1T_2,…,T_{40}, $ so that $ T_1 $ loses to $ T_1 $ for $ i<j $ . in other words, this order uniquely determines the result of every game. There are 40! Such orders and 780 games, so $ 2^{780} $ possible outcomes for the games, Hence, the probability is $ 40!/2^{780} $ .