Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /1206 of 1394

, 2018

Combinatorics Difficulty 5.8 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:
A bag contains nine blue marbles, ten ugly marbles, and one special marble. Ryan picks marbles randomly from this bag with replacement until he draws the special marble. He notices that none of the marbles he drew were ugly. Given this information, what is the expected value of the number of total marbles he drew?

Solution

Solution:
The probability of drawing kk marbles is the probability of drawing k1k-1 blue marbles and then the special marble, which is pk=(920)k1×120p_{k} = \left(\frac{9}{20}\right)^{k-1} \times \frac{1}{20}. The probability of drawing no ugly marbles is therefore k=1pk=111\sum_{k=1}^{\infty} p_{k} = \frac{1}{11}.

Then given that no ugly marbles were drawn, the probability that kk marbles were drawn is 11pk11 p_{k}. The expected number of marbles Ryan drew is
k=1k(11pk)=1120k=1k(920)k1=1120×400121=2011 \sum_{k=1}^{\infty} k\left(11 p_{k}\right) = \frac{11}{20} \sum_{k=1}^{\infty} k\left(\frac{9}{20}\right)^{k-1} = \frac{11}{20} \times \frac{400}{121} = \frac{20}{11}

(To compute the sum in the last step, let S=k=1k(920)k1S = \sum_{k=1}^{\infty} k\left(\frac{9}{20}\right)^{k-1} and note that 920S=Sk=1(920)k1=S2011\frac{9}{20} S = S - \sum_{k=1}^{\infty}\left(\frac{9}{20}\right)^{k-1} = S - \frac{20}{11}.)

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.