Online Course Discussion Forum
MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications
Hello!
I have a few questions regarding the week 7 homework. Firstly, when questions ask for a general formula or recursive formula, do we need to justify our answer (unless specified)? Secondly, on question P4, what is a "natural" bijection? I don't quite understand it, and the question doesn't provide a "definition" for it. Also, on P5, is there a non-negative or positive number of balls in each box (when distributing)? I know it wouldn't make any sense if there were a positive number, but I'm just making sure.
Thank you,
Sophie
I think natural bijection means a bijection which has a clear "pattern" to it? (I'm not entirely sure though). Basically like if A = {0,1,2,3,4,5,...n-1} and B = {1,2,3,4,5,6,...n} then a "natural" bijection from A to B would be 0 --> 1, 1-->2, 2-->3,...,n-1 --> n
Thank you!
I have a few more questions:
I have another question: on F4, I could not find a clear pattern. 16384 is 2 to the 14th power, but how does that correlate to the pattern with 2 to the zeroth, 1st, and 2nd power? I thought it might be 128 (2 to the seventh) or in even powers of 2 (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14). In addition, when they ask to find a bijection or write one out, do we need an example or actually prove that there exists a bijection? Thanks!
Yeah, I made a post about F4, I am confused about it as well. (I am pretty sure it is a typo, due to the context of the problem, Quick Response).
Hello!
- Unless it is extremely obvious, you should try to justify where the formula came from.
- For P4: Take a look at the section about "Combinatorial Proof and Bijections" before the questions on the handout. There is an example about a natural bijection between the outcomes of flipping a coin $4$ times and the words of length $4$ made up only of the letters $H$, $T$: if you throw a coin $4$ times and get heads, tails, tails, heads (in that order), then you can associate the four letter word $HTTH$ for that outcome. As Lucas Sha mentioned, you can see here there is a "clear pattern" there. In some way, it may even be silly to say there is a bijection since it is clearly the easiest (natural) way to list the possible outcomes of throwing four coins. For the problem in question it may help to work on a particular example first, choose a small value for $n$ and list out all the numbers in set $A$, and all the elements in $P(B)$ (make sure to use the hint!). Be careful though, $P(B)$ is a set of sets.
- For P5: you are correct, it is possible to have some empty boxes.
- On F4 there is indeed a typo, the problem should read
$$\binom{7}{0} + 2 \cdot \binom{7}{1} + \cdots + 128 \cdot \binom{7}{7}$$
Best,
David
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