Originally Posted by El Boocho
OK so this is off topic, oh well.
I found this excerpt on someone's blog at
http://www.livejournal.com/~honeyspy/246405.html
I have no idea if this is correct. Any actuaries (Bruce are you still out there?) or other mathmaticians care to comment.
"ok... I got 765 combinations. that doesnt account for things like if someone wanted double of any one topping because if you allow for that, then theoretically it is infinite. if I set it up right, and I think I did, it's like this:
you can have 1 combination where you have all 8 toppings, and 8 where you just have a single topping. to that, you add the following (pardon the notation):
8C7+8C6+8C5+8C4+8C3+8C2
now, since you can have single double or triple orders, you have to multiply this all by 3. so you end up with:
3(9+8C7+8C6+8C5+8C4+8C3+8C2) and I think that that equals 765."
Well, the formula I used still applies to this calculation. It is just 2 to the Nth power where N is the number of possible toppings and then multiply it at the end by the number of sizes. Your guy assumed 8 toppings, but in actuality two toppings he used were bogus (plain and scatterred). Plain == scattered, and you can't order then NOT scattered, so it's not a variable. There are only 6 toppings you can tweak, and 3 sizes.