Announcement: Winner of the Data Science Central Competition

Back in 2017, we posted a problem related to stochastic processes and controlled random walks, offering a $2,000 award for a sound solution, see here for full details. The problem, which had a FinTech flavor, was only solved recently (December 2018) by Victor Zurkowski. Let's start with X(1) 0, and define X(k) recursively as follows, for k 1: So there are two positive parameters in this problem, a and b, and U(k) is always between 0 and 1. When b 1, the U(k)'s are just standard uniform deviates, and if b 0, then U(k) 1. The case a b 0 is degenerate and should be ignored.