d-jason32/birthday-simulation

Birthday Paradox Simulation

This project simulates the Birthday Paradox, demonstrating the probability that in a group of a certain number of people, at least two will share the same birthday. The simulation runs multiple times to estimate this probability.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Prerequisites
• Installation
• Usage
• Code Explanation
• License

Introduction

The Birthday Paradox is a famous problem in probability theory. It states that in a group of just 23 people, there's a better than even chance that at least two people will have the same birthday. This project uses Python to simulate this scenario and calculate the probability.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.x
• tqdm library for displaying a progress bar

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone 
   cd birthday-paradox-simulation

2. Install the required dependencies:

   pip3 install tqdm

Usage

1. Run the simulation:

   python3 birthday_paradox.py

2. Follow the prompts:

   • Enter the number of birthdays to generate (maximum 100).
   • The program will simulate 1,000,000 groups of the specified number of people and display the probability of at least two people sharing the same birthday.

Code Explanation

comparison(birthdayList)

This function takes a list of birthdays and returns the number of duplicate birthdays.

simulation(numBirthdays)

This function runs the simulation 1,000,000 times, generating random birthdays for the specified number of people and counting how often at least two people share the same birthday. It uses tqdm to display a progress bar.

firstComparison(birthdayList)

This function checks if there are any duplicate birthdays in the list and prints the first duplicate it finds.

generateBirthdays(birthdaysRequested)

This function generates a list of random birthdays.

main()

This is the main function that runs the program. It prompts the user for the number of birthdays to generate, prints the generated birthdays, and runs the simulation.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.