Waiting times for one head and for HH with bias
Question
A coin lands heads with probability . What is the expected number of tosses until the first head? What is the expected number of tosses until two heads appear back to back?
Short answer
and . The first is a geometric mean. For HH, let be the expected wait: after the first head ( tosses on average) one more toss either completes HH (prob. ) or sends you back to the start, so , giving (which is for a fair coin).
Adapted from Joshi, Denson & Downes, Quant Job Interview Questions and Answers, Q3.9, p.81; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Markov Chains — Transition Matrices and the Markov Property
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Expectation and Variance Revisited
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