FW. Walk Around the Clock
A quick puzzle from one of our listeners, which has a surprising and interesting solution:
Standing at 4:00, repeatedly flip an unfair coin, moving clockwise if it comes up heads, and counterclockwise if it comes up tails.
What is the probability that you visit every hour 1-11, before you reach 12:00?
In our next post we’ll ask a seemingly unrelated question that turns out to help quite a bit…
The Math Factor in iTunes
RSS feed
Comments RSS
mathbun.com
Steven H. Noble said,
July 2, 2009 at 8:49 pm
I’m guessing if I’m trying to find the null space of an 11×11 matrix to solve this problem I’m missing out on a more straight forward solution?
strauss said,
July 6, 2009 at 4:24 pm
I don’t quite see how that would be helpful– what’s your idea? I can see one way to use an 11×11 matrix, but there’s a simpler approach (which, as one might guess, uses the next post!)