A die is thrown until every possible result (i.e., every integer from 1 to 6) is obtained. Find the expected value of the number of throws.
How do I do that? I understand that probability for the single result is {1,5/6,…,1/6}, but what about the expected value?
Answer
This is a very popular problem. I learned it as the "collector's problem".
Essentially, you want to model rolling a die until a new face is shown
as a geometric distribution with pk=7−k6 where k=1,…,6 is the number of faces you have seen. So, if Xk denotes rolling until you see kth different face, then Xk∼Geom(pk) on {1,2,3,…}. It follows that X=X1+⋯+X6 is the number of rolls until you have seen all six faces. Then
E[X]=E[X1]+E[X2]+⋯+E[X6]=66+65+⋯+61=14.7.
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