Expected draws until the first ace
Question
Cards are turned over one at a time from a well-shuffled standard 52-card deck. On average, how many cards have been turned over at the moment the first ace appears (counting that ace)?
Short answer
. The four aces split the 48 other cards into 5 gaps, and by symmetry each gap holds cards on average. The first ace comes right after the first gap, so the expected count is .
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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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