Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 ia Paper 2 12F b Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-07
For a finite stopping time with target , necessarily . The last toss must be a head and the preceding tosses must contain heads. The negative binomial stopping argument therefore gives likelihood for the biased coin, and for the fair coin. Applying Bayes theorem again yieldsThe two experiments have different combinatorial coefficients, but each coefficient is independent of the coin parameter. Thus posterior equality for proportional likelihoods explains their identical posterior formula. If , a finite positive-head stopping observation has zero likelihood under the biased coin, consistently giving posterior zero. If the target is , the experiment stops at without a toss and the posterior remains ; a positive stopping time would then be impossible.