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The distribution when indistinguishable balls are put into boxes | Ulysses’ trip #85

Open UlyssesZh opened 1 year ago

UlyssesZh commented 1 year ago

https://ulysseszh.github.io/math/2023/05/09/stars-bars-geometric.html

Suppose there are $n$ distinguishable boxes and $k$ indistinguishable balls. Now, we randomly put the balls into the boxes. For each of the boxes, what is the probability that it contains $m$ balls? This is a simple combanitorics problem that can be solved by the stars and bars method. It turns out that in the limit $n,k\to\infty$ with $k/n$ fixed, the distribution tends to be a geometric distribution.