You are bored one day and decide to keep flipping an unfair coin until it lands on tails. It has a 6 0 % chance of landing on heads. If you get tails on the N th flip, the probability that N is an integer multiple of 3 can be expressed as b a , where a and b are coprime positive integers. Find a + b .
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Your explanation was very helpful, but I’m struggling to understand why do you calculate the sum of a series? The text says that we want to calculate the probability of success obtained on the Nth roll. Not the probability of obtaining success at maximum on the Nth roll.
I will appreciate your insight. Piotr
Actually what he calculated was the sum of all the probabilities of getting tails for the first time in Nth roll, in which N is an integer multiple of three.
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Yes, that’s also how I understood his calculations. That was not however what the task was about.
The task was to find the probability of getting tails in 3Nth roll. So, he basically computed all 3Ns.
This is a geometric distribution with the single flip probability of success p = 5 2 . A successful flip is a multiple of 3, so the number of failures before the first success is k = 3 n − 1 , where n = 1, 2 ... ∞ . Summing up the probabilities of all successful flips gives the total probability we are looking for:
P r ( n ) = ∑ n = 1 ∞ p ( 1 − p ) 3 n − 1
Plugging in the numbers gives the probability of 4 9 9 , so the answer is 9+49= 5 8
The probability that you obtain tail during the third attempt is 1 2 5 1 8 . From now on interesting results occur when your probability is multiplied by a power of 1 2 5 2 7 , because in this way your N will be a multiple of 3 . In order to obtain such a probability you notice that this is a geometric series, with ratio 1 2 5 2 7 . So the solution to the geometric series, obtained by using the geometric series formula, is 1 − 1 2 5 2 7 1 = 8 7 1 2 5 . Now you have to multiply this result with the first you obtained, so 1 2 5 1 8 × 8 7 1 2 5 = 4 9 9 . Thus the solution is 4 9
You should sum 9 + 49, to get the answer of 58.
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We want to find the sum of the probabilities of getting tails on a multiple of three:
P r ( tails on 3rd flip ) + P r ( tails on 6th flip ) + P r ( tails on 9th flip ) + ⋯ = ( 5 3 ) 2 5 2 + ( 5 3 ) 5 5 2 + ( 5 3 ) 8 5 2 + … .
This is a geometric series whose initial term is
a 0 = ( 5 3 ) 2 5 2
and whose ratio is
r = ( 5 3 ) 3 .
So the series sums to 1 − r a 0 = 4 9 9 , and our answer is 9 + 4 9 = 5 8 .