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Let's say i have a list of products, and a price for each one.
Let's assume the probability of a customer picking an item in addition to any others he may have picked previously is the same for all products.
How would you go about calculating the probability of the total cost being a particular amount? Would the only way be a brute force algorithm?
Off the top of my head, it seems that you would have to make a table of all possible totals, which, yes, would be brute force. I don't know how else to do it. If you something worth 1 cent, 10 cents, and $1000000, what are the odds that the total will be $1 if they are picking 5 items? Obviously, it is 0%.
I could see maybe devising a method of saying it will be > or < X, but not exactly X.
Sounds like brute force to me, but then, I give up easily.