Comments for "Flipping a coin is not so random after all"
August 25, 2009, 9:38 amFlipping a coin is not so random after all
It turns out that flipping a coin has all sorts of non-randomness:
Here are the broad strokes of their research:
- If the coin is tossed and caught, it has about a 51% chance of landing on the same face it was launched. (If it starts out as heads, there's a 51% chance it will end as heads).
- If the coin is spun, rather than tossed, it can have a much-larger-than-50% chance of ending with the heavier side down. Spun coins can exhibit "huge bias" (some spun coins will fall tails-up 80% of the time).
- If the coin is tossed and allowed to clatter to the floor, this probably adds randomness.
- If the coin is tossed and allowed to clatter to the floor where it spins, as will sometimes happen, the above spinning bias probably comes into play.
- A coin will land on its edge around 1 in 6000 throws, creating a flipistic singularity.
- The same initial coin-flipping conditions produce the same coin flip result. That is, there's a certain amount of determinism to the coin flip.
- A more robust coin toss (more revolutions) decreases the bias.
The paper.
Comments
1.
Comment by truecritic - August 25, 2009, 9:42 am...and don't forget two-headed coins! :)
2.
Comment by joker17 - August 25, 2009, 1:57 pm
These tests were done with multiple tosses of the coin. I learned a few years ago that if you flip a coin only once in your entire lifetime, there will be a 50/50 chance. But if you continually flip the coin, it will always try to balance itself out. In other words, if a coin was flipped heads 5 times in a row, most people have been taught in Universities that it still has a 50/50 chance. But this has been proven false. The more the same outcome of the event, the more it will lean towards change. This is a new theory on odds, not by me, but a report I bought from a math professor.
So, if you saw black on roulette for 15 times in a row, people have been taught that it has a 50/50 chance on the 16th. But what would you bet on?....Red or black. Red of course.
So, if you saw black on roulette for 15 times in a row, people have been taught that it has a 50/50 chance on the 16th. But what would you bet on?....Red or black. Red of course.
3.
Comment by Todd - August 25, 2009, 2:49 pmIf I saw 15 blacks in a row, I would bet on black, not red. In wagering, it makes more sense to go with what's hot. IMHO.
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