Sniffnoy comments on Case Study: the Death Note Script and Bayes - Less Wrong

25 Post author: gwern 04 January 2013 04:33AM

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Comment author: Sniffnoy 09 January 2013 03:59:40AM *  0 points [-]

OK, I think the correct probability here is 1/57. According to OEIS (it cites Stanley as a reference; I haven't taken the time to try to understand why this would be the case), the number of unordered binary trees on a set of n+1 labelled leaves is given by 1*3*...*(2n-1). If we want to count how many of these have two particular leaves directly next to each other, well, we're essentially merging them into one super-leaf; thus we want the same thing on one fewer leaf. Hence the number we want is (1*3*...*55)/(1*3*...*57)=1/57. More generally, if we had n leaves, we'd have 1/(2n-3).

Edit: OK, not going to write out the whole thing here unless someone really wants, but for those skeptical of the above formula, you can prove it with exponential generating functions.