Memorylessness

In probability and statistics, memorylessness is a property of certain probability distributions. It describes situations where the time already spent waiting for an event does not affect how much longer the wait will be. To model memoryless situations accurately, we have to disregard the past state of the system – the probabilities remain unaffected by the history of the process.[1]

Only two kinds of distributions are memoryless: geometric and exponential probability distributions.

  1. ^ "Notes on Memoryless Random Variables" (PDF).