What Are the Odds?

We have crossed the halfway point here at Disney World on day 11 of our MayX. Blogging today are Mary Lib and Zack! We started our day later than normal, giving us a chance to make up for the sleep that we missed out on for our Keys to the Kingdom tour yesterday. After class and lunch we spent our afternoon in Animal Kingdom and are currently writing this blog from Panera at dinner.

Morning Class Time

In our class time this morning, we discussed binomial experiments, probability distributions, and applied the idea of conditional probability to the game Liars Dice which we played yesterday. 

A binomial experiment uses a binomial random variable and allows you to calculate the likelihood of an outcome after performing n-trials in which each results in a success or failure and the probability is fixed and independent for each trial.  This technique can give the probability of a coin landing on heads 5 times if you flip it 7 times. The expected value is the weighted average of outcomes which could tell you how many times you would expect heads if you flip a coin a certain number of times.

Related to the binomial random variable is the geometric random variable. It gives the probability of the first success happening on trial k. This can be used in Disney to see when the first person will give up on a line that isn't moving.

In our games of Liars Dice last night, we could see our dice and had to make a guess on how many of any number there were based on what we had in our hands. Conditional probabilities use this kind of information to calculate the probability of A, given B. Knowing our dice, conditional probability would allow us to make a more accurate bet on the total number of dice displaying a certain number.

Animal Kingdom

In the park today we had FastPasses for Finding Nemo the Musical, Expedition Everest, and DINOSAUR! 

Many of our group took the time to ride Expedition Everest, Primeval Whirl, and watch the It's Tough to be a Bug show before our FastPasses. The It's Tough to be a Bug show was a lot more interactive than any of us remembered. We were sprayed with bug spray, poked in the back by bees, and had bugs crawling on the seats under us. This show is actually inside the Tree of Life, so the line to get to it brings you close to the animals carved into the tree.

While a little cheesy at parts, Finding Nemo the Musical was a cool adaptation of the movie. The actors are much more talented than either of us - singing, dancing, and puppeteering - all at the same time. Our favorite scene was with Squirt the turtle who was flying and flipping over the stage. Thanks to Crush and Squirt, Mary Lib will have "Go With the Flow" stuck in her head for the next few days. 

We finished up our park time on Kali River Rapids. The warning that "you will get wet and may get soaked" was quite the understatement. Based on our experience, the warning should have just said, "Plan to get soaked." However, it was a nice refresher in the heat.

Tonight

Tonight our groups are working on our second project of the trip. On Monday groups tested strategies for our traveling tourist problem. This project asks us to design new solutions to the problem by using genetic algorithms. A genetic algorithm creates new tours based on your current best solutions to the problem. Each group has to create their own operators for creating new tours based on altering one parent tour or a crossover tour from two parents. 

Written by: Mary Lib Saine and Zack Miller