
There are seats on a plane. Suppose the first passengers is drunk and he takes a seat randomly. For each of the other passengers, if his/her seat is not taken by other people, then he/she sits on his/her own seat, otherwise he/she takes a seat randomly. What is the probability that the last passenger takes his/her own seat?
Let’s use to stand for the probability that the last passenger takes his/her own seat, given that there’re seats in total, i.e. . If the first passenger takes his own seat, then the last passenger will take his/her own seat. If the first passenger takes the last passenger’s seat, then the last passenger cannot take his/her own seat (we know that he/she must take the first passenger’s seat). If the first passenger takes the passenger’s seat, then for the passenger, , he/she will takes his/her own seat. Now the passenger has to choose a seat randomly. Since we don’t care about whether the passenger takes his/her own seat or not, we can pretend that the first passenger’s seat is the passengers. From this perspective, the problem has been changed to a same problem with . So conditioning on the seat that the first passenger takes, we have the following recursive formula:
where .
We can use method of generating function to find the formula of general terms.
However, if we notice from the recursive formula that ,
, and so on.
We can easily see that for is the
unique solution for the general terms.
So as long as there’re more than 1 people,
the probability that the last passenger takes his/her own seat is .