edumacational - fun with binomial theory
Jul. 28th, 2004 10:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleI was posting a comment about this on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
icafreak's journal and I thought "it's maths! Random pointless maths! Who wouldn't love that!"
So anyway, I was talking about my love of odd pairings.
I'd love to have written all the possible pairings, even if it's only for a ficlet, but even just counting the major characters there are *so many*. (If we're talking Buffy, Willow, Xander, Giles, Dawn, Anya, Tara, Oz, Riley, Spike, Angel, Cordelia, Gunn, Wesley, Fred, Illyria, Lorne, Harmony, Doyle, Faith, Lindsey and Lilah - 22 people equals (22*21)/2 pairings. That's 231 pairings, unless my maths is shoddier than I think. And it would mean writing something like Lorne/Dawn or Giles/Lindsey...)
I'm sure I'm missing a major character. Connor! How could I forget my boy! And Andrew! Okay, add them. And Snyder, forswmbo. That gives us 25 characters. The number of possible pairings goes up to 300 (25*24/2). 300! I've got a long way to go before I've done all of them.
If our 25 characters are bored with twosomes then there's a gigantamous 25*24*23/6 = 2300 possibilities for hot threeway action. Okay, might be just a bit impossible to do them all.
The moral of this is: more randomness in our pairings is what we need. To start with, someone should write Cordelia/Dawn/Riley. Or, asicafreak suggested, Anya/Illyria.
Disclaimer: should be taken as an estimate only. I may well have screwed up the maths, in which case the mathematicians on my friendslist will point and laugh.
icafreak's journal and I thought "it's maths! Random pointless maths! Who wouldn't love that!"So anyway, I was talking about my love of odd pairings.
I'd love to have written all the possible pairings, even if it's only for a ficlet, but even just counting the major characters there are *so many*. (If we're talking Buffy, Willow, Xander, Giles, Dawn, Anya, Tara, Oz, Riley, Spike, Angel, Cordelia, Gunn, Wesley, Fred, Illyria, Lorne, Harmony, Doyle, Faith, Lindsey and Lilah - 22 people equals (22*21)/2 pairings. That's 231 pairings, unless my maths is shoddier than I think. And it would mean writing something like Lorne/Dawn or Giles/Lindsey...)
I'm sure I'm missing a major character. Connor! How could I forget my boy! And Andrew! Okay, add them. And Snyder, for
swmbo. That gives us 25 characters. The number of possible pairings goes up to 300 (25*24/2). 300! I've got a long way to go before I've done all of them.If our 25 characters are bored with twosomes then there's a gigantamous 25*24*23/6 = 2300 possibilities for hot threeway action. Okay, might be just a bit impossible to do them all.
The moral of this is: more randomness in our pairings is what we need. To start with, someone should write Cordelia/Dawn/Riley. Or, as
icafreak suggested, Anya/Illyria.Disclaimer: should be taken as an estimate only. I may well have screwed up the maths, in which case the mathematicians on my friendslist will point and laugh.
no subject
on 2004-07-28 03:34 pm (UTC)I actually asked for Anya(nka)/Illyria as one of two possible pairings for a ficathon but I doubt I'll get it. :-( Then after that I started thinking about how cool an Illyria/Glory pairing would be with Illyria standing around observing the human muck and Glory hoping it wouldn't stain her shoes that Illyria made her from the skin of their enemies. Clearly I've put too much thought into this. *is weird*
Still, that's some very impressive maths right there, do you reckon you'll ever be able to write them all?
no subject
on 2004-07-28 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-07-28 04:11 pm (UTC)The men in white coats are standing by. *g*