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You're practicing soccer by taking 100 penalty kicks. Assume that you have made the first goal but missed the second. For each of the following kicks, the probability that you score is the fraction of goals you've made thus far. For example, if you made 17 goals out of the first 30 attempts, then the probability that you make the 31st goal is $17/30$. After 100 attempts, including the first two, what is the probability that you score exactly 66 penalty kicks?

So I figured out that the way probability will be distributed across the map will be symmetric about the centre, but apart from that I'm very clueless.

A more ad hoc solution would be to select $(98)C(65)$ ways the person will shoot, and divide by the total number of possibilities which is $2^{98}$. However, that is not giving me the answer.

Any leads would be appreciated!

zoraemon
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In problems like this it can help a lot to reduce the 'size' of the problem, i.e. consider the question: What if the soccer player does not take 100 penalty kicks, but instead just 3 or 4? Let's calculate the probability distribution of the number of goals in these these scenarios explicitly:

Say the player has scored one and missed one; and is now onto kick number three. We know that they will score this kick with probability $\frac12$, thus letting $G_3$ be the amount of goals scored after $3$ kicks we see that $$\mathbb P[G_3=1]=\frac12 \hspace{1cm} \mathbb P[G_3=2]=\frac12.$$ Now let's move on to the case of the $4$-th penalty kick. Again, let $G_4$ be the number of goals scored after $4$ kicks. The probability of the player scoring on the $4$-th kick will depend on whether or not they scored the previous kick, thus a smart idea here would be to condition on the previous result $G_3$. Doing this, we obtain $$\begin{align*}\mathbb P[G_4=1]&=\mathbb P[G_4=1|G_3=1]\mathbb P[G_3=1]+\mathbb P[G_4=1|G_3=2]\mathbb P[G_3=2] \\ &= \frac23 \cdot\frac12 + 0\cdot \frac12\end{align*}$$ and similarly $$\begin{align*}\mathbb P[G_4=2]&=\mathbb P[G_4=2|G_3=1]\mathbb P[G_3=1]+\mathbb P[G_4=2|G_3=2]\mathbb P[G_3=2] \\ &= \frac13 \cdot\frac12 + \frac13\cdot \frac12 = \frac13.\end{align*}$$ As a consequence we also get $\mathbb P[G_4=3]=\frac13$. Therefore the distribution of the number of goals kicked after $3$ penalties is uniform over $\{1,2\}$; and the distribution after $4$ penalties is uniform over $\{1,2,3\}$.

Now: Do you see the pattern? Can you prove this pattern? \ Hint:

You can prove the general pattern via Induction, i.e. compute the distribution of $G_{n+1}$ by conditioning on the result of $G_n$, just as we did above.

Small Deviation
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