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I have a die that produces uniformly distributed values in $\{1,\ldots, k\}$ for some integer $k\geq 2$. Now I play the following game.

I start rolling the die and produce one integer in $\{1,\ldots,k\}$ after another, $X_1,X_2,\ldots$, and I stop when my most recent integer $x$ lies between the previous integer $b$, and the integer $a$ obtained before that. (More formally, the stopping time is the least $n\ge 3$ such that $X_n\in [\,\min\{X_{n-2},X_{n-1}\}, \max\{X_{n-2},X_{n-1}\}\,]$.)

An example: $k=6$, and my dice rolling sequence is $2, 4, 5, 1, 4$ $\implies$ there I stop, since $4$ is in the interval $[1,5]$ of the last two dice rolls $5$ and $1$.

Let $E_k$ be the expected value of the length of one game with a dice of $k$ sides. It may be difficult to give an explicit value for $E_k$, but:

Question. Is $\{E_k:k\in\mathbb{N}, k\geq 2\}$ bounded?

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    $\begingroup$ Good point, thanks for spotting this @PierrePC . I have just edited the question accordingly and hope I didn't miss any $n$ that should have been replaced by $k$ $\endgroup$ Feb 22, 2019 at 12:00
  • $\begingroup$ I think the $n$ vs $k$ error was introduced by me in my “helpful” editing. Sorry... $\endgroup$ Feb 23, 2019 at 1:48

2 Answers 2

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Yes: Given that no stop has been achieved up to time $n$, the probability that a stop is achieved at time $n+3$ is at least $\frac 13$. To see this, notice that given $X_1,\ldots,X_n$, and the values of the (unordered) multiset $\{\{X_{n+1},X_{n+2},X_{n+3}\}\}$, each ordering of the three terms is equally likely, so that there is at least a $\frac 13$ probability that $X_{n+3}$ lies between $X_{n+1}$ and $X_{n+2}$ (slightly above this because there is a positive probability of repetition). It follows that the expected stopping time is at most $\sum_{n=1}^\infty (3n)(\frac 23)^{n-1}\frac 13<\infty$.

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  • $\begingroup$ Also thanks for your excellent edit of my question above, it made it much more readable! Your solution is really nice $\endgroup$ Feb 22, 2019 at 7:33
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Some additional results

For $k=2$, the game ends after 3 throws in 75% of the cases and is guaranteed to end after 4 throws, so $E_2 = 3.25$.

$E_3$ is about 3.45. For $k=3$, the game is guaranteed to end after at most 6 rolls.

$E_4$ is about 3.61. $k=4$ is the smallest $k$, for which the length of the game has no upper bound. For example, the cycle 2, 1, 3, 4,... could go on forever.

I would be interested in the precise value of $E$, when $k$ goes to $\infty$. A simulation of $10^9$ games showed me that $E_{\infty}$ is about 4.7096. A roll in this game means drawing a uniformly distributed random number from the interval $[0,1]$. I include the program below, if anyone is interested.

Simulation for $k = \infty$ in Java

Random r = new Random();
double sum = 0.0;
long n = 1000000000;
for (int i=0; i<n; i++) {
    double a = r.nextDouble();
    double b = r.nextDouble();
    long count = 2;
    while (true) {
        double c = r.nextDouble();
        count++;
        if ((a<=c && c<=b) || (a>=c && c>=b)) {
            break;
        }
        a = b;
        b = c;
    }
    sum += count;
}
double avg = sum / n;
System.out.println("average = "+avg);
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  • $\begingroup$ At first sight, your formula looks good, so I don't see yet what is wrong with it, but I am pretty sure that $p_4 = \frac{1}{4}$. And I suspect that $p_5 = \frac{1}{6}$, and $p_6 = \frac{1}{10}$. $\endgroup$ Feb 26, 2019 at 15:31
  • $\begingroup$ FYI, in my simulation of $10^9$ games, 333'319'160, 250'015'733, 166'656'001, and 100'010'566 games terminated after 3, 4, 5, and 6 rolls, respectively. $\endgroup$ Feb 26, 2019 at 15:40
  • $\begingroup$ I computed the exact solutions for $p_3$ to $p_{10}$ now. Here they come: $p_3 = 2 / 3! = 1/3$, $p_4 = 6 / 4! = 1/4$, $p_5 = 20 / 5! = 1/6$, $p_6 = 72 / 6! = 1/10$, $p_7 = 302 / 7!$, $p_8 = 1446 / 8!$, $p_9 = 7834 / 9!$, $p_10 = 47146 / 10!$ $\endgroup$ Feb 26, 2019 at 16:03
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    $\begingroup$ I wrote another program that generates all permutations of ${1,...,k}$, then checks for each permutation at which position the game would have terminated, and outputs the distribution of these positions. For example, for $k=4$ the output is [0, 0, 0, 8, 6], meaning that for 8 permutations the game would stop after 3 rolls and for 6 permutations it would stop after 4 rolls. The output for $k=10$ is [0, 0, 0, 1209600, 907200, 604800, 362880, 217440, 130140, 78340, 47146]. As all permutations are equally likely, this yields the exact solutions up to $p_{10}$. $\endgroup$ Feb 26, 2019 at 16:54
  • $\begingroup$ The run-time complexity of this method is O(k!) though, so I cannot go much higher than $k=12$, which takes about 20 seconds to compute. $\endgroup$ Feb 26, 2019 at 16:59

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