Birthday problem (birthday paradox) in probability

• Problem def
  How many people are required so that any two people in the group have the same birthday with ate least a 50-50 chance?

There are no tricks to this problem; it involves simply calculating the marginal probability. It is assumed that the probability of a randomly selected person having a birthday on any given day of the year is uniformly distributed across the days of the year, e.g., 1/365.

The intuition might leap to an answer and assume that we might need at least as many people as there are days in the year, e.g. 365.

This intuition likely fails because we are thinking about ourselves and other people matching our own birthday.

That is, we are thinking about how many people are needed for another person born on the same day as you. That is a different question!

Instead, we can think about comparing pairs of people within a group and the probability of a given pair being born on the same day.

The number of comparisons is n x (n-1)/2. For example, if we have 5 people within a group, we would be checking 10 pairs that have the same birthday. For convenient, we could calculate the probability do not have the same birthday among those pairs.

p(2 in n same birthday) = 1 - p(2 in n not same birthday)

In that case, p(2 in n not same birthday) can be calcuated as

p(n) * p(n-1) * p(n-2) … * p(2).

For example, n = 3, that the probability that there is no two people have the same birthday within a three people group can be calculated as the product of p(3)p(2)