Hitting k primes by dice rolls
Probability
2025-02-13 v1 Combinatorics
Number Theory
Abstract
Let be an infinite sequence of rolls of independent fair dice. For an integer , let be the smallest so that there are integers for which is a prime. Therefore, is the random variable whose value is the number of dice rolls required until the accumulated sum equals a prime times. It is known that the expected value of is close to . Here we show that for large , the expected value of is , where the -term tends to zero as tends to infinity. We also include some computational results about the distribution of for .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.08096,
title = {Hitting k primes by dice rolls},
author = {Noga Alon and Yaakov Malinovsky and Lucy Martinez and Doron Zeilberger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.08096},
year = {2025}
}