The frog's single leftward hop
A frog starts on lily pad of pads labelled – 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 for an integer ; find .
Show hints (2)+
- "Uniform among unvisited" means the tour is a uniformly random permutation starting at . A leftward hop is a descent.
- Count permutations of that start with and have exactly one descent (), over .
Answer
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42
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Asked at: Jane Street, Citadel