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No, I don't think it's 1. The weirdness of infinity can go both ways. A classic example being that a random walk on a line or a two-dimensional grid takes you back to your starting point an infinite number of times, but for a three dimensional grid you only return to the start a finite number of times, quite possibly zero.

This problem is equivalent to a one-dimensional random walk where the terminating condition is reaching a value equal to the number of steps you've taken divided by 3. I'm not quite sure how to calculate the probability of that.

Intuitively, I'd expect this to have a finite probability. The variance grows with sqrt(n), which gets arbitrarily far away from n/3.

Looking at it another way, this should be very similar to the gambler's ruin problem where the gambler is playing against an infinitely rich house and their probability of winning a dollar is 2/3. If the gambler starts with $1 then the probability of ever reaching zero is 1 - (1/3)/(2/3) = 50%. Reference for that formula: https://www.columbia.edu/~ks20/FE-Notes/4700-07-Notes-GR.pdf


You can solve it with a linear recurrence relation [0]: the halting probability from position n is ((sqrt(5)-1)/2)^(n+1), where n is twice the number of odds minus the number of evens. (In fact, this +2/-1 random walk is precisely how the machine implements its termination condition.) The expected value of n is 1/3 the number of iterations. At the end of the longest simulation that has been computed, n is greater than 2^37, so the halting probability is less than 10^(-10^10).

[0] https://wiki.bbchallenge.org/wiki/Antihydra#Trajectory

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