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September 1, 20240 citationsOpen Access

Alice and Bob on X: reversal, coupling, renewal

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GGGeoffrey Grimmett

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Abstract

A neat question involving coin flips surfaced on X, and generated an intensive outbreak of `social mathematics'. In a sequence of flips of a fair coin, Alice wins a point at each appearance of two consecutive heads, and Bob wins a point whenever a head is followed immediately by a tail. Who is more likely to win the game? The subsequent discussion illustrated conflicting intuitions, and concluded with the correct answer (it is a close thing). It is explained here why the context of the question is interesting and how it may be answered in a quantitative manner using the probabilistic techniques of reversal, coupling, and renewal.

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Cite This Study

Geoffrey Grimmett (2024) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/68e5a0a2b6db64358753aeb4https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2409.00732
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