Odd number of heads from increasingly biased coins
Question
You have coins. Coin (for ) lands heads with probability . All coins are tossed once. What is the probability that the total number of heads is odd?
Short answer
. For independent coins, by telescoping. So .
Adapted from Wilmott, Frequently Asked Questions in Quantitative Finance, ch. 10 brainteaser 'Biased coins', p.351; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
- Transforms and Moment Generating Functions
- Maximum Likelihood Estimation: Score and Log-Likelihood
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