The life times, Y in years of a certain brand of low-grade lightbulbs follow an exponential distribution with a mean of 0.5 years. A tester makes random observations of the life times of this particular brand of lightbulbs and records them one by one as either a success if the life time exceeds 1 year, or as a failure otherwise. Part a) Find the probability to 3 decimal places that the first success occurs in the fifth observation. Part b) Find the probability to 3 decimal places of the second success occurring in the 8th observation given that the first success occurred in the 3rd observation. Part c) Find the probability to 2 decimal places that the first success occurs in an odd-numbered observation. That is, the first success occurs in the 1st or 3rd or 5th or 7th (and so on) observation.
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
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