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HMMT November 2020 T7

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Roger the ant is traveling on a coordinate plane, starting at ( 0,0 ). Every second, he moves from one lattice point to a different lattice point at distance 1, chosen with equal probability. He will continue to move until he reaches some point PP for which he could have reached PP more quickly had he taken a different route. For example, if he goes from (0,0)(0,0) to (1,0)(1,0) to (1,1)(1,1) to (1,2)(1,2) to (0,2)(0,2), he stops at (0,2)(0,2) because he could have gone from (0,0)(0,0) to (0,1)(0,1) to (0,2)(0,2) in only 2 seconds. The expected number of steps Roger takes before he stops can be expressed as ab\frac{a}{b}, where aa and bb are relatively prime positive integers. Compute 100a+b100 a+b.

Dataset text NuminaMath olympiads. Quoted with source.

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1103

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