In: Statistics and Probability
An experiment consists of repeatedly tossing 2 fair coins until the toss results in one each of a Head and a Tail. What is the mathematical expectation of the number of times you will need to toss the 3 coins to achieve this?
Probability of getting a head and tail is
because there are 2 ways to get a head and a tail. Also, there are
4 possibilities in total.
Let
denote the number of trials it takes to getting the first head and
tail. Then
can take values 1,2,3,...
Then
. This is actually the geometric distribution with parameter
.
The mean of this distribution is :
Hence, the mathematical expectation of the number of times the coin needs to be tossed is 2.