[__anon-2023__]

For the collectible toy problem, how much money would you save if you paired up with someone else and purchased meals until you both had all 4 toys? My intuition says going from 1 collector to 2 collectors would help significantly (like queuing theory).

[kqr]

Hm. I'm sad nobody answered this. I'm also on my phone and in a bad position to give an exact answer. However, rolling a few scenarios[1] and counting manually, I get 16 meals on average, with a standard error of 5. So not conclusive by any stretch, but it seems like it's roughly as expensive to be two people as it is to be one person.

[1]: https://www.random.org/integers/?num=24&min=1&max=4&col=4&ba...

[kqr]

Oops miscalculation -- mean 14, standard error around 1. So at this point I can fairly confidently say it helps to pool the effort of two people, though it helps maybe less than one would think coming from queueing theory.