It Would Have Been One More Ride Because

I apologize for being slow writing the conclusion of the explanation for why my Dearly Beloved and I would expect one more ride following our plan to keep re-riding Disaster Transport as long as a fairly flipped coin came up tails. It’s been a busy week, and actually, I’d got stuck trying to think of a way to explain the sum I needed to take using only formulas that a normal person might find, or believe. I think I have it.

The Help Needed To Get to One

So, it’s established that my little series, representing the number of rides we could expect to get if we based re-riding on a fair coin flip, is convergent. So trying to figure out the sum will get a meaningful answer. The question is, how do we calculate it?

My first impulse is to see if someone else solved the problem first, for exactly the reasons you might guess. This is a case where mathematics textbooks can have an advantage over the web, really, since an introduction to calculus book is almost certain to have page after page of Common Series Sums. Figuring out the right combination of keywords to search the web for it can be an act of elaborate guesswork. Mercifully, Wikipedia has a List of Mathematical Series which covers my problem exactly. Almost.

Why Not Infinitely Many More Rides?

Returning to the Disaster Transport ride problem: by flipping a coin after each ride of the roller coaster we’d decide whether to go around again. How many more times could I expect to ride? Using the letter k to represent the number of rides, and p(k) to represent the probability of getting that many rides, it’s a straightforward use of the formula for expectation value — the sum of all the possible outcomes times the probability of that particular outcome — to find the expected number of rides.

Where this gets to be a bit of a bother is that there are, properly speaking, infinitely many possible outcomes. There’s no reason, in theory, that a coin couldn’t come up tails every single time, and only the impatience of the Cedar Point management which would keep us from riding a million times, a billion times, an infinite number of times. Common sense tells us this can’t happen; the chance of getting a billion tails in a row is just impossibly tiny, but, how do we know all these outcomes that are incredibly unlikely don’t add up to something moderately likely? It happens in integral calculus all the time that a huge enough pile of tiny things adds up to a moderate thing, so why not here?

Just One More Ride?

Given that we know the chance of getting any arbitrary number — let’s say k, because that’s a good arbitrary number — of rides in a row on Disaster Transport, using the scheme where we re-ride if the flipped coin comes up tails and stop if it comes up heads, the natural follow-up to me is: how many more rides can we expect? It’s more likely that we’d get one more ride than two, two more rides than three, three more rides than four; there’s a tiny chance we might get ten more rides; there’s a real if vanishingly tiny chance we’d get a million more rides, if Cedar Point didn’t throw us out of the park and tear the roller coaster down first.

How Many Last Rides?

So our scheme for getting a last ride in on Disaster Transport without knowing in advance it was our last ride was to flip a coin after each ride, and then re-ride if the coin came up tails. (Maybe it was heads. It doesn’t matter, since we’re supposing the coin is equally likely to come up heads as tails.) The obvious question is, how many times could we expect to ride? Or put another way, how many times in a row could I expect a flipped coin to come up tails, before the first time that it came up heads? The probability tool used here is called the geometric distribution.

The Last Ride Of A Roller Coaster

Cedar Point amusement park, in Sandusky, Ohio, built in the mid-1980s a bobsled-style roller coaster named Avalanche Run, because it was the mid-1980s and bobsled-style roller coasters seemed like a good idea. My home amusement park, Great Adventure, had something called the Sarajevo Bobsled opened in that time because back then Sarajevo was thought to be a pretty good city apart from that unpleasantness seventy years before. But Cedar Point’s bobsled roller coaster had a longer existence than Great Adventure’s, and around 1990, it was rebuilt to something newer and more exciting, with a building enclosing it and a whole backstory behind the ride.

Reading the Comics, July 28, 2012

I intend to be back to regular mathematics-based posts soon. I had a fine idea for a couple posts based on Sunday’s closing of the Diaster Transport roller coaster ride at Cedar Point, actually, although I have to technically write them first. (My bride and I made a trip to the park to get a last ride in before its closing, and that lead to inspiration.) But reviews of math-touching comic strips are always good for my readership, if I’m readin the statistics page here right, so let’s see what’s come up since the last recap, going up to the 14th of July.
The text passage is a series of blog posts or articles discussing a mathematical problem related to calculating the expected number of rides on a roller coaster when using a coin flip to decide whether to ride again. The content delves into probability theory, specifically the geometric distribution, and the concept of expectation values in a series of trials.
multiple_questions

the passage contains multiple questions or problems related to the same mathematical concept, but does not provide answers to these questions within the text. the questions are about the expected number of rides on a roller coaster when using a coin flip to decide whether to ride again, and how to calculate this using probability and series sums.
Given a text passage, determine:
    1. If it contains a mathematical question (including word problems or calculations)
    2. If an answer to that mathematical question is provided in the text

First, describe the content structure you found in 1-2 sentences.

Then provide your analysis in the following format:
TYPE: <one of the following values>
- NO_QUESTION
- SINGLE_QUESTION
- SINGLE_QUESTION_WITH_ANSWER
- MULTIPLE_QUESTIONS
- MULTIPLE_QUESTIONS_WITH_ANSWERS
system
It Would Have Been One More Ride Because

I apologize for being slow writing the conclusion of the explanation for why my Dearly Beloved and I would expect one more ride following our plan to keep re-riding Disaster Transport as long as a fairly flipped coin came up tails. It’s been a busy week, and actually, I’d got stuck trying to think of a way to explain the sum I needed to take using only formulas that a normal person might find, or believe. I think I have it.

The Help Needed To Get to One

So, it’s established that my little series, representing the number of rides we could expect to get if we based re-riding on a fair coin flip, is convergent. So trying to figure out the sum will get a meaningful answer. The question is, how do we calculate it?

My first impulse is to see if someone else solved the problem first, for exactly the reasons you might guess. This is a case where mathematics textbooks can have an advantage over the web, really, since an introduction to calculus book is almost certain to have page after page of Common Series Sums. Figuring out the right combination of keywords to search the web for it can be an act of elaborate guesswork. Mercifully, Wikipedia has a List of Mathematical Series which covers my problem exactly. Almost.

Why Not Infinitely Many More Rides?

Returning to the Disaster Transport ride problem: by flipping a coin after each ride of the roller coaster we’d decide whether to go around again. How many more times could I expect to ride? Using the letter k to represent the number of rides, and p(k) to represent the probability of getting that many rides, it’s a straightforward use of the formula for expectation value — the sum of all the possible outcomes times the probability of that particular outcome — to find the expected number of rides.

Where this gets to be a bit of a bother is that there are, properly speaking, infinitely many possible outcomes. There’s no reason, in theory, that a coin couldn’t come up tails every single time, and only the impatience of the Cedar Point management which would keep us from riding a million times, a billion times, an infinite number of times. Common sense tells us this can’t happen; the chance of getting a billion tails in a row is just impossibly tiny, but, how do we know all these outcomes that are incredibly unlikely don’t add up to something moderately likely? It happens in integral calculus all the time that a huge enough pile of tiny things adds up to a moderate thing, so why not here?

Just One More Ride?

Given that we know the chance of getting any arbitrary number — let’s say k, because that’s a good arbitrary number — of rides in a row on Disaster Transport, using the scheme where we re-ride if the flipped coin comes up tails and stop if it comes up heads, the natural follow-up to me is: how many more rides can we expect? It’s more likely that we’d get one more ride than two, two more rides than three, three more rides than four; there’s a tiny chance we might get ten more rides; there’s a real if vanishingly tiny chance we’d get a million more rides, if Cedar Point didn’t throw us out of the park and tear the roller coaster down first.

How Many Last Rides?

So our scheme for getting a last ride in on Disaster Transport without knowing in advance it was our last ride was to flip a coin after each ride, and then re-ride if the coin came up tails. (Maybe it was heads. It doesn’t matter, since we’re supposing the coin is equally likely to come up heads as tails.) The obvious question is, how many times could we expect to ride? Or put another way, how many times in a row could I expect a flipped coin to come up tails, before the first time that it came up heads? The probability tool used here is called the geometric distribution.

The Last Ride Of A Roller Coaster

Cedar Point amusement park, in Sandusky, Ohio, built in the mid-1980s a bobsled-style roller coaster named Avalanche Run, because it was the mid-1980s and bobsled-style roller coasters seemed like a good idea. My home amusement park, Great Adventure, had something called the Sarajevo Bobsled opened in that time because back then Sarajevo was thought to be a pretty good city apart from that unpleasantness seventy years before. But Cedar Point’s bobsled roller coaster had a longer existence than Great Adventure’s, and around 1990, it was rebuilt to something newer and more exciting, with a building enclosing it and a whole backstory behind the ride.

Reading the Comics, July 28, 2012

I intend to be back to regular mathematics-based posts soon. I had a fine idea for a couple posts based on Sunday’s closing of the Diaster Transport roller coaster ride at Cedar Point, actually, although I have to technically write them first. (My bride and I made a trip to the park to get a last ride in before its closing, and that lead to inspiration.) But reviews of math-touching comic strips are always good for my readership, if I’m readin the statistics page here right, so let’s see what’s come up since the last recap, going up to the 14th of July.
user
The text passage is a series of blog posts or articles discussing a mathematical problem related to calculating the expected number of rides on a roller coaster when using a coin flip to decide whether to ride again. The content delves into probability theory, specifically the geometric distribution, and the concept of expectation values in a series of trials.

TYPE: MULTIPLE_QUESTIONS

The passage contains multiple questions or problems related to the same mathematical concept, but does not provide answers to these questions within the text. The questions are about the expected number of rides on a roller coaster when using a coin flip to decide whether to ride again, and how to calculate this using probability and series sums.