Kris Kringle
Our family is breaking with our old everyone-buys-a-gift-for-everyone tradition this year and doing Kris Kringle instead. There’s a bit of kerfuffle about how to select names and get word out to everyone; I mentioned to wifey that the cleanest way would be to write a short program to shuffle the names and send each person a private email. This probably isn’t going to happen at this stage, but I might suggest it for next year. (Should go down well.)
In the meantime, it got me thinking about how to deal with people drawing their own name, which anecdotally seems to happen at least once without fail. I brute-forced some statistics, and the probability of someone not drawing their own name in any given run seems to approach e-1:
1: 0 of 1 = zero 2: 1 of 2 = 1 in 2.000000000000 3: 2 of 6 = 1 in 3.000000000000 4: 9 of 24 = 1 in 2.666666666667 5: 44 of 120 = 1 in 2.727272727273 6: 265 of 720 = 1 in 2.716981132075 7: 1854 of 5040 = 1 in 2.718446601942 8: 14833 of 40320 = 1 in 2.718263331760 9: 133496 of 362880 = 1 in 2.718283693893 10: 1334961 of 3628800 = 1 in 2.718281657666
In other words, there’s about a 63% chance that at least one person will pick their own name and have to redraw. (There’s a 1/n chance that it’ll be the last person, which really screws things up.)
One way to avoid this if we end up doing it programmatically – other than re-shuffling until it works – is to shuffle the list of names, then assign everyone to buy a gift for the person after them in the (cyclic) list. This guarantees nobody getting their own name (for n > 1), and also has the property that there are no disjoint sets of people – everyone is in one cycle, rather than, say, two people buying for each other, or some number of larger cycles.
That seems more festive somehow. Also, it’s an actual advantage of doing it the geek way, since I can’t think of a way of doing it manually; which means I might actually be able to convince everyone that it’s a good idea.
…
Okay, here’s how you’d do to do it manually. Shuffle some playing cards, one for each person. Everyone takes a card, remembers it (without showing anyone), and writes their name on the back. Take the cards back, shuffle them again, and lay them out in a circle, face up. Everyone goes out of the room. One at a time, each person comes into the room (with nobody else watching), finds their own card, picks up the card clockwise from it and reads the name on the back.
Of course, my way prevents cheating.
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