Rounds of two dice needed to see every face
Question
Each round you throw two fair six-sided dice together and note both faces. On average, how many rounds are needed before every one of the values to has shown up at least once?
Short answer
. Track the number of distinct faces seen so far as a Markov chain. From , a round adds , or new faces with probabilities determined by and ; solving the expected-time equations backwards from (e.g. , ) gives .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
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