We have 9 distinct items and three persons. alice is to get 2 items, bob is to get 3 items, and charlie is to get 4 items. as just discussed, this can be done in a! b! 3! 4! ways. find a and b . a= 9 sin responder b= 2 sin responder a different way of generating the desired partition is as follows. we first choose 2 items to give to alice. this can be done in (cd) different ways. find c and d . (there are 2 possible values of d that are correct. enter the smaller value.)