February 2019 Brain Puzzler Solution

Q: A traffic light has a cycle through green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red, etc.
Red and green are each 30 seconds with a 3 second yellow inbetween.
What is the probability that while Amir is watching during a random 3 second interval  that the color changes?

A:
9/63 = 1/7
It is a 63 second cycle.
The light changes at t=30, t = 33 and t = 63 given three three second intervals:
[27,30] and [30, 33] and [60,63] is a total of 9 seconds out of the 63 second interval

 

 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s