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A mirror step variant of gambler's ruin
Lucy Martinez, Rutgers University
Location: https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/94346444480 [password: The 20th Catalan number, alias (40)!/(20!*21!)
Date & time: Thursday, 13 February 2025 at 5:00PM - 6:00PM
Consider a gambler who starts with x dollars. At each gamble, the gambler either wins a dollar with probability 1/2 or loses a dollar with probability 1/2. The gambler's goal is to reach N dollars without first running out of money (i.e., hitting 0 dollars). If the gambler reaches N dollars, we say that they are a winner. The gambler continues to play until they either run out of money or win. This scenario is known as the gambler's ruin problem, first posed by Pascal. We consider a new generalization of the gambler's ruin problem. A particle starts at some point x on a line of length N. At each step, the particle either moves from x to x-1 with probability q1, or moves from x to x+1 with probability q2, or moves from x to N-x with probability p where 0