The frog's single leftward hop

A frog starts on lily pad 11 of pads labelled 1188 left to right. Each turn it hops to a pad it has not visited yet, chosen uniformly at random among the unvisited pads, until all pads are visited. What is the probability that exactly one of its hops is a leftward hop (to a lower-numbered pad)? The probability is 1M\tfrac1M for an integer MM; find MM.

Show hints (2)+
  1. "Uniform among unvisited" means the tour is a uniformly random permutation starting at 11. A leftward hop is a descent.
  2. Count permutations of {1,,8}\{1,\dots,8\} that start with 11 and have exactly one descent (=120=120), over 7!=50407!=5040.

Answer

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42

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Asked at: Jane Street, Citadel

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