a funny mistake
While watching the early morning activity in Tofino inlet from my rental desk, I was looking at a recent fivethirthyeight Riddle, which consisted in finding the probability of stopping a coin game which rule was to wait for the n consecutive heads if (n-1) consecutive heads had failed to happen when requested, which is
p+(1-p)p²+(1-p)(1-p²)p³+…
or
While the above can write as
or
hence suggesting
the answer is (obviously) false and the mistake in separating the series into a difference of series is that both terms are infinite. The correct answer is actually
which is Euler’s function. Maybe nonstandard analysis can apply to go directly from the difference of the infinite series to the answer!
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