Expected head fraction when stopping once ahead
Question
You toss a fair coin as many times as you like and score the fraction of tosses that came up heads, i.e. the ratio of heads to total tosses. Suppose you stop the first time the number of heads exceeds the number of tails. What is the expected value of , to three decimal places?
Short answer
. You stop at toss with heads, which happens with probability ( Catalan). The expected ratio is , which is .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
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