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What do outcomes actually look like? How can we represent them? One approach would be to write an outcome as a string of four numbers like this:

which represent the outcome in which the first kid gets 3 cookies, the second and third kid each get 1 cookie, and the fourth kid gets 2 cookies. Represented this way, the order in which the numbers occur matters. 1312 is a different outcome, because the first kid gets a one cookie instead of 3. Each number in the string can be any integer between 0 and 7. But the answer is not \(7^4\text{.}\) We need the sum of the numbers to be 7.