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Permutations With Repetitions

There are two formulas for calculating permutations depending on whether repetitions are allowed or not. The formula for permutations with repetitions is n^r, where n is the number of objects and r is the number chosen. The formula for permutations without repetitions is n!/(n-r)!, where n is the number of objects, r is the number chosen, and ! is the factorial symbol. Combinations can be calculated using binomial coefficients when order does not matter, both with and without repetitions.

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150 views4 pages

Permutations With Repetitions

There are two formulas for calculating permutations depending on whether repetitions are allowed or not. The formula for permutations with repetitions is n^r, where n is the number of objects and r is the number chosen. The formula for permutations without repetitions is n!/(n-r)!, where n is the number of objects, r is the number chosen, and ! is the factorial symbol. Combinations can be calculated using binomial coefficients when order does not matter, both with and without repetitions.

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williamgalaxys
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Permutations with repetitions

When the order matters, and an object can be chosen more than once, the number of permutations is

where n is the number of objects from which you can choose and r is the number to be chosen. This assumes objects have an equal chance of being chosen (1/n). For example, if you have the letters A, B, C, and D and you wish to discover the number of ways to arrange them in three letter patterns (trigrams) 1. order matters (e.g., A-B is different from B-A, both are included as possibilities) 2. an object can be chosen more than once (A-A possible) you find that there are 43 or 64 ways. This is because for the first slot you can choose any of the four values, for the second slot you can choose any of the four, and for the final slot you can choose any of the four letters. Multiplying them together gives the total. Remember, that the permutation formulas only calculate the number of needed ways or combinations in cases, for which, only the order matters and not the components. The following formula looks like this:

where n is the total number of components and r1, r2 ... rn are the numbers of repetitions of each of the components in your data. As a practical example of this, we may want to see in how many ways can we rearrange the following row of letters: A, A, B, B, C. First of all we have to write out all the repetitions:

where r1, r2, r3 are the number of repetitions of A's, B's and a C respectively. The total number of letters is 5, so our n = 5. Applying the formula we get the following:

The total number of ways in which we can rearrange the given row of letters is 30 ways. Due to the large number of arrangements, it would be quite hard to write out the arrangements by hand, as it was done in the example above.

Permutations without repetitions


When the order matters and each object can be chosen only once, then the number of permutations is

where n is the number of objects from which you can choose, r is the number to be chosen and "!" is the standard symbol meaning factorial. For example, if you have five people and are going to choose three out of these, you will have 5!/(5 3)! = 60 permutations. Note that if n = r (meaning the number of chosen elements is equal to the number of elements to choose from; five people and pick all five) then the formula becomes

where 0! = 1. For example, if you have the same five people and you want to find out how many ways you may arrange them, it would be 5! or 5 4 3 2 1 = 120 ways. The reason for this is that you can choose from 5 for the initial slot, then you are left with only 4 to choose from for the second slot etc. Multiplying them together gives the total of 120. As a second, very easy, example we may want to see in how many ways we may rearrange the three letters A, B, C. Using the given above combinatorial formula for permutations without repetitions we have 3! or 3 2 1 = 6 ways. If we check the following on practice, try to rearrange the letters by hand, we have the following combinations: ABC, ACB, BCA, BAC, CAB, CBA. If, for instance, the three letters were A, A, B, then the number of combinations will be different and we would have to use a different combinatorial formula, the formula for permutations with repetitions.

[edit] Combinations without repetitions


When the order does not matter and each object can be chosen only once, the number of combinations is the binomial coefficient:

where n is the number of objects from which you can choose and k is the number to be chosen. For example, if you have ten numbers and wish to choose 5 you would have 10!/(5!(10 5)!) = 252 ways to choose. The binomial coefficient is also used to calculate the number of permutations in a lottery. As a second example of how to use this particular combinatorial formula, we may want to see in how many ways we can produce 4 distinguishable groups of people, each of which consists of 5 people, out of total of 20 people. Remember that in this case the only important thing to us are the components of groups and not the order, in which people appear in those 4 separate groups. The answer to this problem is going to be a very large number. Calculating all the possible combinations we get the following:

The above formula gives the total ways to choose the first group of 5 people from the original 20. The second group of 5 people will be chosen from the remaining 15, so the formula for that is:

Likewise, the third group of 5 people will be chosen from the remaining 10, so the formula is:

Finally, there is only one way to choose the last group of 5 people (there are only 5 people left!). Multiplying these four numbers yields the total number of combinations: 15504 * 3003 * 252 * 1 = 11,732,745,024. As it was expected the number of ways, in which, we can organize 4 groups, each consisting of 5 people, out of total of 20 people, is a very large number of combinations. If the groups are not

distinguishable, then this must be divided by 4! to remove the dependence on order of the group assignments.

Combinations with repetitions


Main articles: Multiset#Multiset coefficients and Stars and bars (probability) When the order does not matter and an object can be chosen more than once, then the number of combinations is

where n is the number of objects from which you can choose and k is the number to be chosen. For example, if you have ten types of donuts (n) on a menu to choose from and you want three donuts (k) there are (10 + 3 1)! / 3!(10 1)! = 220 ways to choose (see also multiset).

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