Rolling until the running total is a multiple of six
Question
A fair die is rolled repeatedly, and you stop as soon as the sum of all rolls so far is divisible by . What is the expected number of rolls?
Short answer
. Whatever the current total is modulo , exactly one face makes the new total divisible by . So each roll stops the process with probability independently of the past, and the number of rolls is geometric with mean .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
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