Friedman vs P\'olya
Abstract
Suppose an urn contains initially any number of balls of two colours. One ball is drawn randomly and then put back with balls of the same colour and balls of the opposite colour. Both cases, and are well known and correspond respectively to P\'olya's and Friedman's replacement schemes. We consider a mixture of both of these: with probability balls are replaced according to Friedman's recipe and with probability according to the one by P\'olya. Independently of the initial urn composition and independently of , , and the value of , we show that the proportion of balls of one colour converges almost surely to . The latter is the limit behaviour obtained by using Friedman's scheme alone, i.e. when . Our result follows by adapting an argument due to D. S. Ornstein.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.16768,
title = {Friedman vs P\'olya},
author = {Raphael Alves and Rafael A. Rosales},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.16768},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
4 pages, 1 figure, corrected minor typos