Head density in tosses with no two heads adjacent
Question
A fair coin is tossed times, and you learn that the resulting sequence never has two heads in a row. Let be the conditional expected number of heads. The limit equals for integers with as small as possible. Compute .
Short answer
. Conditioning makes all valid strings equally likely, and they are counted by Fibonacci numbers. Counting heads through the recursion (a string starts with T or with HT) shows the head fraction tends to , where is the golden ratio. So , , and .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
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