Whats the chance that upon randomly adding $\pm1$ to a number, it eventually reaches $0$

78 Views Asked by At

Start with an integer $k$. Then at each step either add or substract $1$ randomly, if after some amount of steps you get the number $0$ the process terminates. What's the probability that the process terminates?

There's really not much context, to be honest the question arised while placing garlics on Plants vs. Zombies due to the nature they have. The probability is obviously grater that $1/2^k$ but when trying to find a general rule for each case I get stuck.

If I had to guess, I would guess the probability is $1$, since heuristically this feels like if the process didn't terminate, the partial sums would hover around $k$ and it feels likely eventually it would hover far enough