[Help]How to solve this expected value problem for trie

Revision en2, by its_aks_ulure, 2020-04-24 08:41:17

I was preparing some problems for a college contest from the past few weeks and came up with this problem idea.

Given N words consisting of either lowercase English letters or a special character '#'. 
Find the expected number of nodes in the trie after a trie is constructed replacing all the special character('#') in the words uniformly randomly with any letter between 'a' to 'z'. 

I want to know if there exists any polynomial-time solution for this problem.

Thanks.

Tags #help, #trie

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en4 English its_aks_ulure 2020-04-24 18:40:27 1 Tiny change: '\n\nThanks.\n' -> '\n\nThanks\n'
en3 English its_aks_ulure 2020-04-24 16:39:58 2 Tiny change: 'polynomial-time solut' -> 'polynomial time solut'
en2 English its_aks_ulure 2020-04-24 08:41:17 0 (published)
en1 English its_aks_ulure 2020-04-24 08:40:26 554 Initial revision (saved to drafts)