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Question Directory
Cereal Box Toys
Suppose a cereal manufacturer has a promotion - each cereal box they sell contains one of six toys randomly and all with equal probability. What's the expected number of cereal boxes you need to buy to have all six toys?
The probability of opening a cereal box containing a new toy given you have $k$ toys is
$$
P(\text{new} | k) = \frac{6-k}{6}.
$$
First, we want to find the expected number of cereal boxes needed to find a new toy given we have $k$ toys. You can either see that opening a cereal box containing a new toy given $k$ toys is a Bernoulli trial, or calculate the expectation directly by setting up the recursion relation
$$
\text{E}[\text{new} | k] = 1 \cdot P(\text{new} | k) + \left(1 - P(\text{new} | k)\right)[ 1 + \text{E}[X] ]
$$
to determine that the expected number of boxes we need to open is
$$
\text{E}[\text{new} | k] = \frac{1}{P(\text{new} | k)}.
$$
To calculate the expected number of boxes we need to get all six toys, we need to calculate
$$
\text{E}[N] = \sum_{k=0}^5 \text{E}[\text{new} | k]
$$
which evaluates to
$$
\text{E}[N] = \frac{6}{6} + \frac{6}{5} + \frac{6}{4} + \frac{6}{3} + \frac{6}{2} + \frac{6}{1} = 14.7.
$$