The next time you’re lining up to use one of the portable toilets at a trade show, concert, or any event, you might want to use math to choose your urinal. Yes, you heard right, Math.
The secretary’s 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 pick the best portable potty without an equation; Just wear Porties!
But for the sake of having some harmless fun, let’s get back to bathroom math:
TOILET MATHEMATICS: 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 head straight to the portable toilets. According to 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 Number 1. Toilet 1 is amazingly clean, the cleanest of the 3. The middle toilet is labeled number 2 and is a bit dirtier than the first. Bathroom number 3? A complete disaster zone. For obvious reasons, the toilets in real time 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 of arranging a group of toilets in this model. This means that the probability of you reaching toilet number 1 gets worse as you add more and more toilets. However, with only 3 toilets, you have a 50% chance of choosing toilet 1 if you follow the rule of thumb of rejecting the first toilet you check and choosing the portable potty that 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 lowers the odds 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 about 46 percent. With each new toilet added to the model, your chances of success decrease by approximately 4%. The illustrated simulation works decently in limited bathroom situations, obviously. However, many events offer many more restrooms. To work on a larger scale, another mathematical answer emerges. Read the text below to learn the real trick (besides using Porties) to finding 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 bathroom by searching exactly 37% of the bathrooms out of the total number of bathrooms. After paying at 37%, you can follow the “best yet” rule. After 37% of the toilets have been tried, look for the next toilet you find that seems better than all the ones you’ve already tried. For example, if there are 100 restrooms at a music concert, you must look inside 37 of them to pass the tipping point. Only then does your choice of any bathroom after that seem better than all the bathrooms you saw before, with a higher rate of being successful when doing so.
There you have it now on how to use math when trying to choose the best portable potty chair. Nobody 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 situation in the bathroom, 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.