Rolling a die until a value repeats
Question
You roll a fair six-sided die over and over, stopping on the first roll that shows a value seen earlier. Let be the total number of rolls and .
(a) Find .
(b) Find .
(c) Find the probability that given that the game lasts at least three rolls.
Short answer
(a) . (b) . (c) . For (a), the second roll must be new () and the third a repeat (). For (b), only six distinct values exist, so a repeat must occur by roll and all probability lies within . For (c), , divided by .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Expectation, Mean, and Variance
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
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