Re: can anyone help me with the calculation of statistical probability?

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:53:08 -0700 (PDT), flame.dawn@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Here is the question. This concerns a claim of plagiarism. There are
two indexes of a similar text numbering about 750,000 words. The first
index has 27,740 terms in it, while the second index has 3,500 terms
in it. The authors of the first index claim that the authors of the
second plagiarized their index, but it turns out the indexes are
mostly different, and only a few terms are similar. Can anyone
calculate what the random similarity would be, i.e., if we assume that
there was no plagiarism and that index 1 (27740 terms) and index 2
(3500 terms) were independently derived, what would be the probability
that some of the terms would still be identical if the text to which
the indexes refer is 80%-90% similar.

yes
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