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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 11 to 66 has shown up at least once?

Short answer

70219/9240≈7.6070219/9240\approx7.60. Track the number ii of distinct faces seen so far as a Markov chain. From ii, a round adds 00, 11 or 22 new faces with probabilities determined by i6\tfrac{i}{6} and 6−i6\tfrac{6-i}{6}; solving the expected-time equations backwards from e6=0e_6=0 (e.g. e5=3611e_5=\tfrac{36}{11}, e4=27155e_4=\tfrac{271}{55}) gives e0=702199240e_0=\tfrac{70219}{9240}.

Adapted from QuantQuestions.io; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.

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