If John flips a fair coin ten times, let the probability that he gets at least 5 heads in a row be , where and are coprime positive integers . What is ?
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Since nobody else has published a solution yet...
This question is basically just asking you to find a way to avoid double counting:
Case 1 : First five coins are heads: 3 2 1 chance of occurring
Case 2 : Second five coins are heads: 3 2 1 chance of occurring... but then we double count the ones where the first 6 coins are all heads. In fact there's a neat little trick to avoid this double counting: We suppose the first flip gives tails in case 2 as this then makes it mutually exclusive to Case 1. Now this case gives 6 4 1
Case 3,4,5,6 third set of five, etc. up to 6th set of five coins, each with a tails at the start. These four cases gives 6 4 4
Now we add the chances together to get 6 4 7 with 7+64=71
Now try coin flipping 2