No empty box after a geometric number of balls
Question
A fair coin is tossed until the first head; if that happens on toss , you receive balls. Each ball is then dropped into one of three labelled boxes, chosen uniformly and independently. What is the probability that every box ends up with at least one ball?
Short answer
. Given balls, inclusion-exclusion gives . Averaging against uses geometric sums: .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
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