Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2024 ib Paper 2 18H Solution Created 2026-09-23 Updated 2026-09-25
If the urn contains green balls, it contains red balls: both update rules preserve the difference . Until absorption at , the green count is therefore a birth-death chain withThe functionis harmonic, since
Let and be the hitting times of and . The optional sampling theorem for a supermartingale, applied to the bounded stopped martingale , givesSolving,Letting , the events on the left increase to eventual termination. The harmonic hitting probability for the balanced-difference urn is therefore