Technically, she could have lost way more, she just successfully lost both.
But if she starts with 20 pairs, and only loses a sock if she wears it, and only wears matching pairs, and only wears one pair per day, and has ~5% chance of losing exactly one sock on any given wear, then you’d expect her to lose a sock every 20 days, so after ~400 days she would have lost one from every pair.
I guess the real question is how long did it take to reach this point, so we can calculate the odds of her losing a sock on any given day (there’s a “sock market” pun in here somewhere, I’m sure…sonks?).
This seems so unlikely that it may be done on purpose. Is there a way to calculate the probability of this being on purpose? For instance, if she had 30 pairs of socks to start with, it seems unlikely to reach 20 single socks if they are randomly lost. Intuitively it should depend on how far we are from the expected value of single socks after losing N socks, but idk how to model nor calculate this.
Technically, she could have lost way more, she just successfully lost both.
But if she starts with 20 pairs, and only loses a sock if she wears it, and only wears matching pairs, and only wears one pair per day, and has ~5% chance of losing exactly one sock on any given wear, then you’d expect her to lose a sock every 20 days, so after ~400 days she would have lost one from every pair.
I guess the real question is how long did it take to reach this point, so we can calculate the odds of her losing a sock on any given day (there’s a “sock market” pun in here somewhere, I’m sure…sonks?).
I knew I was at the right place.
This seems so unlikely that it may be done on purpose. Is there a way to calculate the probability of this being on purpose? For instance, if she had 30 pairs of socks to start with, it seems unlikely to reach 20 single socks if they are randomly lost. Intuitively it should depend on how far we are from the expected value of single socks after losing N socks, but idk how to model nor calculate this.