Reference no: EM131824430

Early probability theory owes a debt to Chevalier de Mere, a rich Frenchman who liked gambling. More importantly for our story, he was an acquaintance of Blaise Pascal. De Mere played a gambling game in which he bet that he could throw a six in four throws of a die. His empirical evidence suggested that this game was biased slightly in his favor, so that in the long run he won slightly more often than he lost, and hence made money. Later de Mere became interested in a game where he rolled two dice and bet that he would roll double six at least once in 24 throws. He came up with 24 since there were 6 times as many possibilities for the outcome of two dice as there are of one, so he figured it would take 6 times as many throws to reach a game that was again slightly in his favor. But to check himself, he asked Pascal to do the computations for him. Follow in Pascal's footsteps and determine the probability of winning each of these games. In fact, you should be able to do this at least two different ways (using two different distributions).