Alternating die game with unequal winning faces
Question
Two players take turns rolling one fair die, with player 1 going first. Player 1 wins immediately on rolling a or ; player 2 wins immediately on rolling any of . Turns alternate until somebody wins. If and are the two players' winning probabilities, what is the larger of the two?
Short answer
. Player 1 wins at once with probability ; otherwise both players must miss (probability ) and the game restarts. So , giving and .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
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