Exercise
Consider the game of tennis when deuce is
reached. If a player wins the next point, he has advantage. On the following point, he either wins the game or the game returns to deuce. Assume that for any point, player A has probability .6 of winning the point and player B has probability .4 of winning the point.
- Set this up as a Markov chain with state 1: A wins; 2: B wins; 3: advantage A; 4: deuce; 5: advantage B.
- Find the absorption probabilities.
- At deuce, find the expected duration of the game and the probability that B will win.
\medbreak Exercises \ref{exer 11.2.15} and \ref{exer 11.2.16} concern the inheritance of color-blindness, which is a sex-linked characteristic. There is a pair of genes, g and G, of which the former tends to produce color-blindness, the latter normal vision. The G gene is dominant. But a man has only one gene, and if this is g, he is color-blind. A man inherits one of his mother's two genes, while a woman inherits one gene from each parent. Thus a man may be of type G or g, while a woman may be type GG or Gg or gg. We will study a process of inbreeding similar to that of Example by constructing a Markov chain.