An absent minded professor lost his latest set of question papers. In a panic, he decided to give his students marks chosen from a uniform distribution of the reals from 0 to 100.
But there is a problem. Two of the students in his class are identical twins, who study together and so get the similar marks. If their marks differ by more than , they will suspect that something is wrong.
The probability that the professor does not attract suspicion can be expressed in the form , where and are positive coprime integers, determine the value of .
Details and Assumptions
The marks need not be integers, they are simply real numbers. The maximum marks in the test were
, and minimum
.
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This problem is best handled geometrically. The probability of two twins' scores coming within 20 of one another is simply the area of shaded region divided by the total area of the entire square. The two non shaded regions, if put together, form another square whose area is 2 5 1 6 , so our ratio is 1 − 2 5 1 6 , which is equal to 2 5 9 . Thus, our answer is 9 + 2 5 = 3 4