How many coin tosses would you need until you get $n$ Heads or $m$ Tails?

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Janson, Svante, Martinez, Lucy, Zeilberger, Doron
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Janson, Svante
Martinez, Lucy
Zeilberger, Doron
author_facet Janson, Svante
Martinez, Lucy
Zeilberger, Doron
contents We harness both human ingenuity and the power of symbolic computation to study the number of coin tosses until reaching $n$ Heads or $m$ Tails. We also talk about the closely related problem of reaching $n$ Heads and $m$ Tails. This paper is accompanied by a Maple package that enables fast computation of expectations, variances, and higher moments of these quantities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07803
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How many coin tosses would you need until you get $n$ Heads or $m$ Tails?
Janson, Svante
Martinez, Lucy
Zeilberger, Doron
Probability
Combinatorics
60 (Primary) 05 (Secondary)
We harness both human ingenuity and the power of symbolic computation to study the number of coin tosses until reaching $n$ Heads or $m$ Tails. We also talk about the closely related problem of reaching $n$ Heads and $m$ Tails. This paper is accompanied by a Maple package that enables fast computation of expectations, variances, and higher moments of these quantities.
title How many coin tosses would you need until you get $n$ Heads or $m$ Tails?
topic Probability
Combinatorics
60 (Primary) 05 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07803