Four points are independently chosen uniformly at random from the interior of a regular dodecahedron. What is the probability that they form a tetrahedron whose interior contains the dodecahedron's center?
Solution
Situate the origin at the dodecahedron's center, and call the four random points , where . To any tetrahedron we can associate a quadruple , where ranges over all conjugates of the cycle (123) in the alternating group is the sign of the directed volume . Assume that, for a given tetrahedron , all members of its quadruple are nonzero (this happens with probability 1). For 4, if we replace with its reflection through the origin, the three members of the tetrahedron's quadruple that involve all flip sign, because each is a linear function of the vector . Thus, if we consider the 16 sister tetrahedra obtained by choosing independently whether to flip each through the origin, the quadruples range through all 16 possibilities (namely, all the quadruples consisting of ). Two of these 16 tetrahedra, namely those with quadruples and , will contain the origin. So the answer is .