odin and i ate at a local chinese restaurant and were quite suprised to see we got the same fortune in our fortune cookies. of course, it made we wonder what the odds were of that happening. while i imagine the odds aren’t infinitesimally small, they still must be fairly unlikely since i’ve cracked open a lot of fortunes cookies over the years and never seen duplicates.

i tried to figure it out but i couldn’t find any reliable information aside from anecdotes like this, “This particular fortune cookie factory produces 4 million cookies per day, and uses 5,000 different fortunes, which means that each fortune printed is going to be duplicated 800 times per day.”

that’s a significant number of duplicates produced every day, but i’m guessing that they’re boxed in such way to reduce the chance of a duplicate ending up in a single box?