4: The Brute Force method

  coin flipping 

The brute force method to answering this question is to generate a whole lot of data.
If we wanted to know if a coin was fair, we could flip it 1000 times and see how many heads came up, right?

This situation with sickdays is a little more complicated. We want to know how often a
years worth of sickdays (let’s say 100 sickdays in total for 10 employess) contain 42 or more Mondays
and Fridays. So what we have to generate is a thousand years worth of sickdays.

How do we do that?

a brute force computer
For a computer, its easy to generate 100 randomly chosen sick days. Here’s an example:

When you click, the box will fill with 100 randomly chosen sickdays,
and the number of Mon/Fri sickdays will be tabulated below. Try clicking several times.
Is it unusual to have 42 Monday/Friday sickdays?

Number of Mondays/Fridays:Click below!