Birthday Paradox
June 20, 2014
The birthday paradox, which we studied in a previous exercise, states that in any group of 23 people there is a 50% chance that two of them share a birthday. The BBC recently published an article that shows 16 of the 32 World Cup teams, each consisting of 23 players, have shared birthdays, thus demonstrating the paradox precisely. Today’s exercise asks you to recreate their calculation.
You can obtain the same listing of player birthdays that the BBC used from FIFA. Another source is the player rosters at WikiPedia.
Your task is to demonstrate that the 2014 World Cup rosters honor the birthday paradox. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 