Abstract:A classical probability question asks for the expected waiting time for flipping a coin (fair or not) until a series of consecutive k heads occur. Now instead of k heads, we can ask for the expected waiting time for a prescribed string such as HTHHTT (H for 'head' and T for 'tail'), and furthermore, the following more general setting: replacing coin flipping by taking a letter, one at a time, what is the expected waiting time until a prescribed string (a series of letters) is reached? Here we allow different p… Show more
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