Alice's toss count when Bob needs more tosses
Question
Alice and Bob each toss their own fair coin until it first shows heads. Given that Bob needed strictly more tosses than Alice, what is the expected number of tosses Alice made?
Short answer
. , which sums to . So given is geometric with ratio : .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
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