Baby Boomers

by Kevin Lin

China has been grappling with a population problem for some time. For numerous social and cultural reasons, families strongly prefer male children to female. Consider a hypothetical city somewhere in China where the practice has arisen that every family continues to procreate until a son is produced, at which point they stop having children. Assuming that boys and girls are born with equal probability, what is the ratio of boys to girls after 100 generations?

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