mscroggs.co.uk
mscroggs.co.uk

subscribe

Blog

World Cup stickers 2018, pt. 2

 2018-06-16 
This year, like every World Cup year, I've been collecting stickers to fill the official Panini World Cup sticker album. Back in March, I calculated that I should expect it to cost £268.99 to fill this year's album (if I order the last 50 stickers). As of 6pm yesterday, I need 47 stickers to complete the album (and have placed an order on the Panini website for these).

So... How much did it cost?

In total, I have bought 1781 stickers (including the 47 I ordered) at a cost of £275.93. The plot below shows the money spent against the number of stickers stuck in, compared with the what I predicted in March.
To create this plot, I've been keeping track of exactly which stickers were in each pack I bought. Using this data, we can look for a few more things. If you want to play with the data yourself, there's a link at the bottom to download it.

Swaps

The bar chart below shows the number of copies of each sticker I got (excluding the 47 that I ordered). Unsurprisingly, it looks a lot like random noise.
The sticker I got most copies of was sticker 545, showing Panana player Armando Cooper.
Armando Cooper on sticker 545
I got swaps of 513 different stickers, meaning I'm only 169 stickers short of filling a second album.

First pack of all swaps

Everyone who has every done a sticker book will remember the awful feeling you get when you first get a pack of all swaps. For me, the first time this happened was the 50th pack. The plot below shows when the first pack of all swaps occurred in 500,000 simulations.
Looks like I was really quite unlucky to get a pack of all swaps so soon.

Duplicates in a pack

In all the 345 packs that I bought, there wasn't a single pack that contained two copies of the same sticker. In fact, I don't remember ever getting two of the same sticker in a pack. For a while I've been wondering if this is because Panini ensure that packs don't contain duplicates, or if it's simply very unlikely that they do.
If it was down to unlikeliness, the probability of having no duplicates in one pack would be:
\begin{align} \mathbb{P}(\text{no duplicates in a pack}) &= 1 \times\frac{681}{682}\times\frac{680}{682}\times\frac{679}{682}\times\frac{678}{682}\\ &= 0.985 \end{align}
and the probability of none of my 345 containing a duplicate would be:
\begin{align} \mathbb{P}(\text{no duplicates in 345 packs}) &= 0.985^{345}\\ &= 0.00628 \end{align}
This is very very small, so it's safe to conclude that Panini do indeed ensure that packs do not contain duplicates.

The data

If you'd like to have a play with the data yourself, you can download it here. Let me know if you do anything with it...
                        
(Click on one of these icons to react to this blog post)

You might also enjoy...

Comments

Comments in green were written by me. Comments in blue were not written by me.
 Add a Comment 


I will only use your email address to reply to your comment (if a reply is needed).

Allowed HTML tags: <br> <a> <small> <b> <i> <s> <sup> <sub> <u> <spoiler> <ul> <ol> <li> <logo>
To prove you are not a spam bot, please type "factor" in the box below (case sensitive):

Archive

Show me a random blog post
 2024 

Feb 2024

Zines, pt. 2

Jan 2024

Christmas (2023) is over
 2023 
▼ show ▼
 2022 
▼ show ▼
 2021 
▼ show ▼
 2020 
▼ show ▼
 2019 
▼ show ▼
 2018 
▼ show ▼
 2017 
▼ show ▼
 2016 
▼ show ▼
 2015 
▼ show ▼
 2014 
▼ show ▼
 2013 
▼ show ▼
 2012 
▼ show ▼

Tags

live stream reddit asteroids determinants mathslogicbot platonic solids accuracy flexagons the aperiodical game of life standard deviation radio 4 golden ratio sport convergence fence posts guest posts chebyshev numbers phd mathsjam coins anscombe's quartet menace chess pac-man simultaneous equations weather station python estimation error bars recursion statistics pascal's triangle sorting correlation finite element method inverse matrices dinosaurs computational complexity zines electromagnetic field dates runge's phenomenon puzzles propositional calculus bubble bobble hats world cup youtube finite group matt parker ternary christmas card cambridge martin gardner final fantasy go programming machine learning hexapawn football tmip pi countdown binary pythagoras folding tube maps manchester science festival gerry anderson squares matrix multiplication weak imposition errors talking maths in public rugby matrix of cofactors 24 hour maths logic bodmas speed oeis reuleaux polygons wave scattering matrices fonts interpolation dragon curves a gamut of games wool php crossnumber draughts pi approximation day curvature data exponential growth graph theory realhats news gather town people maths big internet math-off plastic ratio noughts and crosses fractals boundary element methods royal institution quadrilaterals captain scarlet advent calendar hyperbolic surfaces arithmetic royal baby raspberry pi inline code graphs london underground national lottery crochet triangles trigonometry pizza cutting christmas tennis matrix of minors javascript mean sound newcastle data visualisation palindromes books harriss spiral games databet frobel edinburgh craft probability geometry signorini conditions ucl hannah fry manchester polynomials bempp sobolev spaces logs golden spiral numerical analysis game show probability logo datasaurus dozen map projections braiding video games nine men's morris london geogebra latex dataset preconditioning cross stitch gaussian elimination misleading statistics chalkdust magazine folding paper light turtles rhombicuboctahedron approximation mathsteroids european cup stickers stirling numbers

Archive

Show me a random blog post
▼ show ▼
© Matthew Scroggs 2012–2024