Recent content by russellhq

Thanks everyone for your contributions, but I'm afraid the discussion has passed my level of understanding! Is is possible to break this down into something that can be put in a spreadsheet?

Monte Carlo is where I am going but I was hoping there would be a nice formula that covered this problem.

Thanks Serena, but I don't think I'm making myself clear. For example, if at the start of the 100 coin flips, I flip 20 heads in a row, then my condition has been met and I don't need to continue to the end. I hope that makes things clearer.

Hi Serena, I don't think that's what I'm looking for. An example using the coin flip analogy. Say I flip a coin 100 times and run a count of the number of heads and tails. Every time I flip a head, I add 1 to the count and every time I flip a tails I subtract 1 from the count. What is...

Hi Serena, from what I've looked at, I would think it would be a normal distribution with some sort of relationship to Pascal's Triangle. Beyond that I'm stumped!

I would like to change the question slightly to: I walk 100 steps, what is the probability that during my walk I am never more than +20 steps from my original starting point.

I've been trying to find the solution to the following problem but it's evaded me thus far. Take the classic one dimension random walk scenario. I start at point 0 and can either step forward +1 step or step backwards -1 step (equal probability). I can countinue like this for N steps. If...