Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/ib/paper-2/20h/b/solution

A complete excursion from along any one arm and back to has mean length . This follows from the same path recurrence, or from Kac's lemma: the graph has edges, the stationary distribution of simple random walk assigns mass to , so its mean return time is .
Let be the mean time to hit starting at . On each visit to , the first step reaches with probability ; with probability it begins a wrong-arm excursion of mean duration , after which the problem restarts. Thus
The walk first takes mean time to reach , so the requested time from is

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