You live in a village but work in another village. You decided to follow the straight path between your house (A) and the working place (B), but there are several rivers you need to cross. Assume B is to the right of A, and all the rivers lie between them.
Fortunately, there is one "automatic" boat moving smoothly in each river. When you arrive the left bank of a river, just wait for the boat, then go with it. You're so slim that carrying you does not change the speed of any boat.
Days and days after, you came up with the following question: assume each boat is independently placed at random at time 0, what is the expected time to reach B from A? Your walking speed is always 1.
To be more precise, for a river of length L, the distance of the boat (which could be regarded as a mathematical point) to the left bank at time 0 is uniformly chosen from interval [0, L], and the boat is equally like to be moving left or right, if it’s not precisely at the river bank.