fair dice and put away all dice showing a unique value, but re-roll any dice set that have the same value (one set at a time), and continue doing this until you have put away all the dice, then the expected sum of all the dice is where and are relatively prime integers. Find .
If you start by rollingFor example, one sequence could be that you roll three 's and two 's for a partial sum of , then you would re-roll the three 's to get two 's and one for a partial sum of , then you would put away the single (since it is unique to that roll) and re-roll the two 's to get one and one for a partial sum of , then you would put away both those dice (since they are different) and now re-roll the two 's (from the first roll) and get one and one for a final sum of .
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Expectation is additive, so we can concentrate on one die. Every time we roll a die, the expected outcome is 3 . 5 , so the expected sum equals 3 . 5 ⋅ 5 ⋅ N 5 , where N 5 is the expected number of times we will roll a given die when it is one of 5 .
We get a system of equations as follows: N 2 N 3 N 4 N 5 = 6 1 N 2 + 1 = 3 6 1 N 3 + 3 6 1 0 N 2 + 1 = 2 1 6 1 N 4 + 2 1 6 1 5 N 3 + 2 1 6 7 5 N 2 + 1 = 1 2 9 6 1 N 5 + 1 2 9 6 2 0 N 4 + 1 2 9 6 1 5 0 N 3 + 1 2 9 6 5 0 0 N 2 + 1 Each of the fractions in the above system of equations is the probability that the die we roll will be part of a group of a given size with the same result. For instance, the coefficient of N 3 in the last equation is the probability that the die we roll will be a part of a group of 3 with the same result, which is the probability that exactly 2 of the other 4 dice match our die, which is ( 2 4 ) ( 6 1 ) 2 ( 6 5 ) 2 = 1 2 9 6 1 5 0 .
The solution of this system is N 2 N 3 N 4 N 5 = 5 6 = 3 5 4 8 = 1 5 0 5 2 2 8 6 = 1 1 1 3 7 1 8 3 3 6 and the expected sum is 1 1 1 3 7 1 8 3 3 6 ⋅ 2 3 5 = 1 5 9 1 4 5 8 4 0 , so the answer is 4 7 4 3 1 .