Drawing card pairs until the deck is cleared
Question
A deck of 20 cards contains two cards of each value from 1 to 10. Each turn you draw two cards at random from what remains; if they have the same value they are discarded, otherwise both go back into the deck. You continue until the deck is empty. What is the expected number of turns?
Short answer
. With pairs left, a turn succeeds when the second card matches the first, probability , so the wait averages turns. Summing over gives .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
- Continuous Random Variables and Probability Density Functions
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