11 December 2017

The BIFHSGO Match the Picture Challenge

A fun part of the BIFHSGO meeting on Saturday, before the Great Moments presentations, was the challenge of matching each of eight director's photographs to that of an ancestor or blood relative.
About 160 people were at the meeting and something like half participated. Nobody got all 8 right, nor 7, 6, 5, nor 4. Three people got three correct. If they were just guessing how many would be expected to guess three correctly?

Using the binomial distribution the bar chart shows with random guessing you'd expect on average one out of the 80 participants to get three correct. On average there's only a 10% chance of anyone of the 80 guessing four or more correctly.

Perhaps three people with three correct answers rather than the one expected shows skill. Or perhaps this is an example of a 5 per cent chance of there being three correct guesses among 80 people. The audience reaction suggested to me that one of the matches was easier to discern than the others.

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