On de Moivre's solutions of the problem of duration of play 1708--1718 (Q1202987)

In 1708 Montmort formulated a stochastic problem on the duration of play between two gamblers which is to continue until one of them is ruined. The first to study this problem was Montmort himself and N. Bernoulli. In 1712 and 1718, de Moivre published his own pertinent findings. The author briefly discusses the work of the first two scholars and describes de Moivre's contributions in detail. He offers a reconstruction of the lacking demonstrations of de Moivre's formulas. The most interesting of the author's conclusions concerns the probability that the game between two gamblers having an equal number of counters will not end in a given number of rounds. He believes that de Moivre issued from a certain recurrent relation and determined the function sought as a linear combination of a finite number of finite geometric progressions. In 1990, the author published his book ``A history of probability and statistics and their applications before 1750'' (Zbl 0731.01001) where the relevant sections carry an additional reference to E. C. Fieller (1931) who had studied some of de Moivre's pertinent findings.