15. Consider a miner trapped in a room that contains three doors. Door 1 leads him to...
Question:
15. Consider a miner trapped in a room that contains three doors. Door 1 leads him to freedom after two days of travel; door 2 returns him to his room after a four-day journey; and door 3 returns him to his room after a six-day journey.
Suppose at all times he is equally likely to choose any of the three doors, and let T denote the time it takes the miner to become free.
(a) Define a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables X1,X2 ... and a stopping time N such that T =
N i=1 Xi Note: You may have to imagine that the miner continues to randomly choose doors even after he reaches safety.
(b) Use Wald’s equation to find E[T ].
(c) Compute E[
N i=1 Xi|N = n] and note that it is not equal to E[
n i=1 Xi].
(d) Use part
(c) for a second derivation of E[T ].
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