The next time you’re in line to use one of the porta-potties at a fair, concert, or any event, you might want to use math to choose your potty. Yes, you heard right, Mathematics.
The secretary problem, a mathematical theory might be your best solution for this. But if you literally shit your pants when you hear the name Maths, and no one blames you, you can always choose the best porta-potty without an equation; Just use Porties!
But for the sake of having some harmless fun, let’s go back to bathroom math:
TOILET MATH: A PROOF
There’s no need to panic the next time you have too much Pepsi to drink at a concert or festival and have to go straight to the porta-potties. Based on a sequence of recent mathematical experiments, there is an ideal value that can be considered. For example, consider a layout model consisting of 3 different toilets. Let’s label the toilet on the far left as Number 1. Toilet 1 is amazingly clean, the cleanest of the 3. The middle toilet is labeled Number 2 and is slightly dirtier than the first. Bathroom number 3? A complete disaster zone. For obvious reasons, the real-time toilets are not going to be limited to 3 nor will they be so neatly arranged. However, for this demonstration, we will stick with the 3 ordered toilets.
There are 6 different permutations; the different number of possible ways to arrange a group of toilets in this model. This means that the probability of you getting to toilet number 1 gets worse as you add more and more toilets. However, with only 3 toilets, you have a 50/50 chance of choosing toilet 1 if you follow the golden rule of turning down the first toilet you check out and choose the porta-potty you think is the best one yet. In all 6 odds, there is an average 50% chance of winning the jackpot.
WHAT IF THERE ARE MORE TOILETS IN THIS CASE:
As mentioned above, adding more toilets decreases the chances of choosing the most delicious toilet of all. If the demo above had 4 toilets to choose from instead of 3, the success rate would drop to around 46 percent. With each new toilet added to the model, your chances of success are reduced by approximately 4%. The illustrated simulation works decently in limited bathroom situations, obviously. However, many events offer many more bathrooms. To work on a larger scale, another mathematical answer arises. Read the text below to learn the real trick (besides using Porties) to find the best portable potty from a larger selection using math.
THE BEST SHOT
Mathematical theories suggest that you will have the best chance of finding the cleanest restroom by searching exactly 37% of the restrooms out of the total number of restrooms. After paying at 37%, you can follow the “best so far” rule. After 37% of the baths have been tried, find the next bath you find that seems better than all the baths you’ve already tried. For example, if there are 100 toilets at a music concert, you must look inside 37 of them to pass the tipping point. Only then does your choice of any bath after that seem better than all the baths you’ve seen before, with a higher positive rate doing so.
There you have it now on how to use the math when trying to choose the best portable potty. No one can imagine in their wildest dreams that baths and mathematics had so much to do with each other. The next time you find yourself in a dangerous bathroom situation, try this mathematical theory of the secretary problem. You might be surprised how a little math can go a long way when it comes to choosing the most delicious dip.
