The Three-Tower Problem

initial chips in pile number…

1

5

2

5

3

5

keep the number of initial chips equal

seed

1

General

:

20

1.4803×

-16

10

is too small to represent as a normalized machine number; precision may be lost.

General

:

20

(-2.96059×

-16

10

)

is too small to represent as a normalized machine number; precision may be lost.

General

:

21

1.4803×

-16

10

is too small to represent as a normalized machine number; precision may be lost.

General

:Further output of General::munfl will be suppressed during this calculation.

There are three piles of chips. Two piles are chosen at random and a chip is moved from the first choice to the second. This procedure is continued until one of the piles becomes empty. The Demonstration shows simulations of this process. You can see the probabilities of the duration of the process and read the expected value and variance of the duration.