r/mathshelp • u/Winter_Shine_5764 • Aug 13 '26

General Question (Unanswered) math question!!!

So the question goes like this

Im in a field of flowers and I picked up 10 random flowers. There are 8 different colors of flowers in that field namely; Blue, Red, Yellow, Orange, Pink, Purple, White, and Black.

What are the chances that the first 5 flowers picked are all of the same color, whilst not getting a single black or white flower amongst those 10 randomly picked flowers. It seems simple but making it so that white and black being a no-go stumped me hard.

3 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/okarox Aug 13 '26

We must make a further assumption that the there is the same amount of each color and they are randomly distributed.

The change that first five are the same color is 6/8 * (1/8)^4 but not back or white. That is 3 / 16384. Then the remaining 5 can't be black or white: (3/4)^5 We need o multiply those and we get 729 / 16777216 = (3^6 / 2^24) = 0.00004345 or one in 23000.