Defining the probability space for rolling a dice infinitely many times

measure-theoryprobabilityprobability theory

Say we want to know the probability that when we roll a dice infinitely many times, we get 6 infinitely often. Intuitively the answer is $1$, but how do we construct a probability space to model this?

The natural sample space is $\Omega = \{ 1, \dots, 6\}^{\mathbb N}$, i.e. the set of sequences taking values in $\{ 1, \dots, 6\}$. Can we simply take $\mathcal F$ to be the power set of $\Omega$ and define a sensible probability measure $\mathbb P$ (this measure, if it exists, would have to assign probability zero to any countable subset of $\Omega$)? How would we construct $\mathbb P$ to have the properties we want (e.g. independence between rolls)?

Best Answer

The trick of using base-$6$ expansions on $[0, 1]$ in the comments is nice but you might find it a little inelegant, since after all the problem statement makes no reference to real numbers, and there is this non-uniqueness issue (it doesn't matter since it does not affect the probability of anything - we only have "non-uniqueness up to a set of measure zero" - but I think it's a little conceptually unsatisfying).

Alternatively there is a general construction of the countable product of probability measures, which is relatively simple in this case. The measurable sets are taken to be the cylinder $\sigma$-algebra. This is just saying the measurable sets are generated by the events "the first $n$ dice rolls have these exact values." The probability measure is determined by what it does to these events and those probabilities should be the obvious thing (specifying the first $n$ dice rolls gives an event of probability $\frac{1}{6^n}$). This measure can be thought of as Haar measure on the product of infinitely many copies of the finite cyclic group $\mathbb{Z}/6$.

If you believe that this all works out then the desired statement follows by the second Borel-Cantelli lemma.