Forgive Me My SINs - A Peek Inside Yagowe's Head
I see a lot of Social Insurance Numbers* in my job- every document that comes through has to have a SIN on it, and if it doesn't we have to write it on. Because of the way my mind works I'm constantly looking for patterns in the numbers. After a while I began to notice that at least one of the 3-digit clusters was often a palindrome.
Then I did the math and realized that there was a 10% chance that any random 3-digit number would be a palindrome, and that there was, therefore, a 1-(9/10)^3 = 27.1% chance that any given SIN would have at least one palindrome as one of its groups**.
So not really a pattern after all. But it was fun doing the math.
*For the non-Canadians, SINs are a unique 9-digit identifier comprised of three groups of three digits.
**This may not actually be quite true for SINs, as there are some other restrictions on what the digits can be, but it should be at least close.
Then I did the math and realized that there was a 10% chance that any random 3-digit number would be a palindrome, and that there was, therefore, a 1-(9/10)^3 = 27.1% chance that any given SIN would have at least one palindrome as one of its groups**.
So not really a pattern after all. But it was fun doing the math.
*For the non-Canadians, SINs are a unique 9-digit identifier comprised of three groups of three digits.
**This may not actually be quite true for SINs, as there are some other restrictions on what the digits can be, but it should be at least close.