medium puzzles
| medium | probability |
On a given highway, trucks arrive at the station according to a Poisson process with Lambda = 0.1/minute. This means that after a truck is just passed, the time for the next truck to arrive is an exponential random number with average arrival time of 10 minutes. Your car just broke on this highway, and you are waiting for the next truck for hitchhiking, what is your expected waiting time? On average how many minutes ago the last truck left?
It's not 5 minutes. Exponential distribution has memoryless property.
Using memoryless property of exponential distribution, the expected waiting time is 10 minutes. This also holds backwards, hence the expected time last truck passed is also 10 minutes. But this does not violate the total inter-arrival time of 10 minutes, because if your car breaks at a random time, you are more likely to be in long interval than a short one. I don't have time today, remind me to post a more mathematical explanation.