Talk:Lady tasting tea

Great add
I just wanted to mention this is a fun cool article to add. Thanks for doing so! Talgalili (talk) 12:40, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your kind words.I created this add to prevent the appearance that the well-established phrase, "the lady tasting tea" was being used on Wikipedia to promote the (good) book with that title. Having two articles, and a appropriately positive link to the book seemed like a good idea. (As a general policy, private concerns should not be able to seize public or common property.) Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 14:52, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * The question is what was the outcome of the test? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.229.171.143 (talk) 23:25, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

May need elaboration
There could be some elaboration around the "Tea-Tasting Distribution" table as to what how/why column #3 is calculated the way it is, and clarify what "x" and "o" stand for (i.e. if cups c1..c4 have had e.g. tea added last, then x at position 1 means c1 was correctly selected by the lady in question.) vr (talk) 14:50, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   17:42, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Done. Loraof (talk) 19:28, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

16 instead of 70 combinations?
If we're assuming that every tea-first cup is the same as any other (which might be wrong to begin with, but the experiment makes more sense if you don't care that you choose the tea-first cups in a different order), I think there are only two options for each cup in the two groups. One group will be the complement of the other, so we only care about four cups and two options. 2^4 = 16, just like the lovely illustration with x and o in the article with 16 "combinations of selection." Maybe we could change it to T and M instead though?

I think you can stop there before you get to 70; there are truly only 6 combinations in the group with two correct (like C(4,2) = "four choose two" = 6), instead of 36... to multiply by 6, xxoo would have to use the index of the cups and double count 1256, 1257, 1258, 1265, 1267, 1268. The combination formula "8 choose 4" treats every cup you pull as *different from all the remaining cups*, when there's really only 4 interchangeable cups of tea-first and milk-first.

Right? I could easily be wrong, but it shouldn't be too hard to change if I'm right because there's already a nice demonstration of all 16 combinations in the article. FoolishBex (talk) 19:06, 12 August 2021 (UTC)