Gain from respinning the revolver in two-bullet roulette
Question
A six-chamber revolver is loaded with bullets in random chambers and the cylinder is spun. You and a friend alternate pulls, and your friend goes first and survives. Before your pull you can either spin the cylinder again or leave it. By how much does spinning raise your survival probability compared with not spinning?
Short answer
. Without a spin, the next chamber is one of the unused chambers, of them empty: survival . With a spin, survival is . The difference is .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
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