Wednesday, September 16, 2015

probability - Number of die rolls needed for average to converge to roll expectancy?


I'm aware there are similar questions, but I haven't been able to find what I'm asking.


Say we have an n-sided die, labeled with 1 thru n and roll it N times. We take the average, call it m.


The die is fair, so the expectancy for the die roll is E=n+12.


How large must N be for the average to be within ϵ from E with a probability, say, p?


For example, 20-sided die: E=10.5, choose ϵ=0.01, and p=0.99.


So how many times do I have to roll the 20-sided die for the average to lie in the interval [10.49,10.51] with 99% probability?



Answer



The variance of a single roll is n2112 so the standard deviation of the average of N rolls is n2112N.


For a normal distribution, the probability of being within Φ1(p+12) standard deviations of the mean is p, where Φ1 is the inverse of the cumulative distribution of a standard normal.


For large N you can use the central limit theorem as an approximation, so you want n2112NΦ1(p+12)ϵ, i.e. N(n2112)(Φ1(p+12)ϵ)2.


So in your numerical example (p+12)=0.995, Φ1(p+12)2.5758, ϵ=0.01 and n=20 so N2206103.1 which is certainly large.


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