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There are NN 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 PnP_n to stand for the probability that the last passenger takes his/her own seat, given that there’re nn seats in total, i.e. N=nN=n. 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 ith,1<i<ni^{th}, 1<i<n passenger’s seat, then for the jthj^{th} passenger, 1<j<i1< j\lt i, he/she will takes his/her own seat. Now the ithi^{th} passenger has to choose a seat randomly. Since we don’t care about whether the ithi^{th} passenger takes his/her own seat or not, we can pretend that the first passenger’s seat is the ithi^{th} passengers. From this perspective, the problem has been changed to a same problem with N=ni+1N=n-i+1. So conditioning on the seat that the first passenger takes, we have the following recursive formula:

Pn=1n×1+1n×0+i=2n11nPni+1=1ni=1n1Pi, n2,P_n=\frac{1}{n}\times1+\frac{1}{n}\times0+\sum_{i=2}^{n-1}\frac{1}{n}P_{n-i+1}=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^{n-1}P_i,\ n\ge2,

where P1=1P_1=1.

We can use method of generating function to find the formula of general terms. However, if we notice from the recursive formula that P2=12P_2=\frac{1}{2}, P3=12P_3=\frac{1}{2}, P4=12P_4=\frac{1}{2} and so on. We can easily see that Pi=12P_i=\frac{1}{2} for i2i\ge2 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 12\frac{1}{2}.