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First HH completed exactly on toss ten

Question

A fair coin is tossed until heads appears twice in a row. What is the probability that the game ends on toss number 1010?

Short answer

17/51217/512. Tosses 99 and 1010 must be heads, toss 88 must be a tail, and tosses 11–77 must avoid HH. Strings of length mm with no HH are counted by Fibonacci numbers (2,3,5,8,…2,3,5,8,\dots), giving 3434 for m=7m=7, so the probability is 34/210=1751234/2^{10}=\tfrac{17}{512}.

Adapted from QuantQuestions.io; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.

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