Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2009/ia/paper-2/10f/a/solution

View the accessible rooms as the open cluster of bond percolation on a rooted ternary tree. Each accessible room has three forward corridors, independently open with probability , so its number of accessible children has the binomial distribution . The counts at successive levels form a binomial branching process with offspring probability generating function
Let be the probability that the root has no open path to level . Then , and independence of the three descendant subtrees gives
The sequence increases to the smallest fixed point in , the branching extinction probability. Thus is close to that solution for large .
Connectivity is the relevant escape event: if no window is reachable, escape is impossible; if one is reachable, ordinary random wandering reaches a window eventually with probability one. Before reaching level the guest moves within a finite connected graph, so an accessible exit cannot be avoided forever. This interpretation does not require the guest to move monotonically outward.

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