Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 ia Paper 2 12F Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-06
Interpret random choice of coin as equal prior probabilities, and the tosses as independent conditional on the chosen coin. Let denote two heads. The conditional probabilities are and . For posterior coin selection from repeated tosses, Bayes theorem givesThe tosses need not be unconditionally independent, because the same hidden coin is used twice. If the coin-choice prior were instead , the answer would be ; equal choice gives the stated .
For nondecreasing uniform samples in the lottery, all ordered samples have equal probability by the discrete uniform distribution and independence. A nondecreasing sample is uniquely specified by its multiplicities , with . The stars and bars argument places separators among identical markers, giving multiplicity vectors. There is exactly one nondecreasing ordered sample for each such vector, so the probability isThis counts samples with ties correctly; multiplying a single strictly increasing count by would not handle the repeated values.