L1

Consecutive Heads

Junior Quant · Brainteasers & Logic

Tflip 1Hflip 2Tflip 3Hflip 4Hflip 5goal ✓

Flip a fair coin repeatedly. Stop when two consecutive heads appear. How many flips on average?

Question

A fair coin is flipped until two consecutive heads appear. What is the expected number of flips? Set up a system of equations using conditional expectations from each state.