Sunday, March 28, 2010

What are the chances?

Remember in school when you learned about probability?  There were always questions like, "What is the probability with 6 dice that you will roll 3 twos?"  I wonder what the probability of this happening is:

When JP worked at Alabama Adventure he met a guy, Adam, who had lived at our apartment complex a few years ago.  He then moved away from Birmingham for a while but came back.  When he came back, he lived in our apartment complex again a few buildings over from us.  When JP invited him over one night, Adam declared, "This is the exact apartment I lived in the first time I lived here."  We thought it was the coolest thing that we met someone who had lived in our EXACT apartment.

Last week our community group had a social with another community group where we met a few people we had not met before.  I got to talking to one of the guys (I'm terrible with names so I don't remember his).  Anyway, I was asking him where he lived, and he lived in our apartment complex.  I asked him which building he lived in.  He told me, "Well I've lived there for about 3 years but I've changed apartments.  I went from one side of the dumpster to the other."  I responded, "We live next to the dumpster!"  We figured out he used to live in our building.  I asked him when he moved out of the building and turns out he moved out the month I moved in.  That was too much of a coincidence so I had to ask, "What apartment number did you live in?" Yep turns out he lived in our EXACT apartment directly before us.

Seriously, what are the chances in a city of 229,800 (per wikipedia) you would meet not one but TWO people who lived in the EXACT same apartment as you?

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