Practise modelling chance processes with valid simulations, estimating event probabilities from repeated trials, and interpreting long-run relative-frequency behaviour.
Nine sales representatives, 6 men and 3 women, at a small company wanted to attend a national convention. There were only enough travel funds to send 3 people. The manager selected 3 people to attend and stated that the people were selected at random. The 3 people selected were women. There were concerns that no men were selected to attend the convention.
An alternative to calculating the exact probability is to conduct a simulation to estimate the probability. A proposed simulation process is described below.
Each trial in the simulation consists of rolling three fair, six-sided dice, one die for each of the convention attendees. For each die, rolling a 1, 2, 3, or 4 represents selecting a man; rolling a 5 or 6 represents selecting a woman. After 1,000 trials, the number of times the dice indicate selecting 3 women is recorded.
Does the proposed process correctly simulate the random selection of 3 women from a group of 9 people consisting of 6 men and 3 women? Explain why or why not.
Part (c):
No, the process does not correctly simulate the random selection of three women from a group of nine people of whom six are men and three are women. The random selection of three people among nine is done without replacement. However, in the simulation with the dice, the three dice rolls in any given trial are independent of one another, indicating a selection process that is done with replacement.