Expose the independent coordinates in order and let , . This is the Doob exposure martingale. For fixed earlier coordinates, write . The remaining coordinates have the same distribution for all , and the coordinate-change hypothesis gives . Thus the conditional range of has length at most , and its conditional mean is zero.
Here is the Hoeffding lemma needed for the sharp constant. If a mean-zero random variable lies in an interval of length , set . Its second derivative is the variance under the exponentially tilted law. Under any such law, variance is at most , by comparison with squared distance from the interval midpoint. Since , integration gives for all real . Applying this conditionally and iterating the tower property yields
The exponential Markov bound now gives
For choose . Apply the same argument to and add the two tails, proving the McDiarmid inequality
For , is constant almost surely, and every positive-deviation probability is zero.
For the neighbourhood application, the ambient points must be elements of , equivalently binary strings; the printed is a type error. An -element ambient set could not generally satisfy the stated exponential-size lower bound. Use the uniform product probability space on the Boolean cube and set . Flipping one coordinate changes this Hamming distance by at most one, so . Put . Since , the proved two-sided inequality gives, for ,
Consequently ; the same bound is immediate if . Therefore
This proves the Boolean cube expansion from bounded differences:
The meaningful range is ; real radii are interpreted by the inequality on the integer-valued Hamming distance. The converted TeX's final is another corruption: the original PDF has .
Take independent random variables , each with the continuous uniform distribution on , and set . Then , and the events are mutually independent events. The product probability space supplies a model for the entire infinite sequence; a finite list of simulated values is only an illustration.
For , the p-series is summable:
The Basel problem supplies the total sum, and the integral test for convergence gives the displayed tail bound. The First Borel-Cantelli lemma makes the limsup of events have probability zero. In fact, the tail bound implies that the probability of even one alarm at or after is at most ; for , it is at most . This bound remains valid for dependent events with the same individual probabilities.
For , the harmonic series diverges, so the Second Borel-Cantelli lemma makes the limsup of events have probability one. There is also an exact finite-horizon calculation using independent events:
For any fixed , this finite product of numbers tends to zero as . Every infinite tail therefore contains an alarm almost surely, even though the individual probabilities tend to zero.
Figure 1.
Summable and harmonic probabilities: partial sums and the probability of a later event
. The left panel shows finite partial sums. On the right, the blue curve is the infinite tail of the squared-reciprocal p-series, bounding the probability of a later event by the union bound; the gray curve is its upper bound. For harmonic probabilities, mutually independent events have a later occurrence with probability one, while the shared-uniform counterexample to the second Borel-Cantelli lemma has tail probability . The infinite claims follow from the calculations, not from the finite plotted range. Details.