Many of the counting problems in this section might at first appear to be examples of counting functions. After all, when we try to count the number of ways to distribute cookies to kids, we are assigning each cookie to a kid, just like you assign elements of the domain of a function to elements in the codomain. However, the number of ways to assign 7 cookies to 4 kids is \({10 \choose 7} = 120\text{,}\) while the number of functions \(f: \{1,2,3,4,5,6,7\} \to \{a,b,c,d\}\) is \(4^7 = 16384\text{.}\) What is going on here?
in-context