And a toast covered in jam lands 100% of the time on the jam side.
Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
51–60 of 193 posts
Re: Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the opposite of what the paper says. If the coin was biased you'd expect it to land on heads more often regardless of what side it starts on. The coins land on the side they start on more often.
No, first of all due to imperfections in the manufacture of real coins, there are actually no fair coins. Also the bias in the probability affects the first throw as well as all the rest. If your dataset is composed of first throws/rest of the throws, you’re going to see they are correlated.
I think you're missing the fact that you don't have to chain coin flips literally right after another.
As the other commenter said, in between coin flips, use a highly secure PRNG to orient the coin randomly. This would correct for your bias (if true).
Re: Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Next you'll cite Bible verse.
“We toss the coin, but it is the Lord who controls its decision.” - Proverbs 16:33 (TLB)
The very verse I was about to post! (Though I was going to quote it as more customarily and literally translated, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.”)
To add interest: there are plenty of people who firmly believe this, and make decisions by the drawing of lots, in various possible forms. I’m one. It’s taken me in interesting and unexpected directions this year.
Re: Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its not, its a bias towards which side the coin started on.
Which is either heads or tails.
A coin with a heads bias is more likely to land on heads no matter how it's thrown.
A coin with a same side bias is more likely to land on heads if it's thrown with heads facing up, and more likely to land on tails if thrown with with tails facing up.
Re: Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
#55I think I figured this out when I was about 6 years old. It pretty much is always true.
Re: Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
#56Easy way to get a fair result from an unfair coin toss: Flip the coin twice in a row, in this case starting with the same side facing up both times, so it's equally unfair for both tosses. If you get heads-heads or tails-tails, discard and start over until you get either heads-tails or tails-heads, which have equal probabilities (so you can say something like HT = "heads" and TH = "tails"). This works even if the coi…
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Re: Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its not, its a bias towards which side the coin started on.
Which is either heads or tails.
If you take a specific coin and find that when you prepare it to be flipped showing heads up, that it is more likely to land heads up, and that when you prepare it to be flipped tails up, it is more likely to land tails up, it seems confusing to call that coin 'heads or tails biased'
Re: Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like he did everything! I first heard of Von Neumann in international relations & economics classes as the person who established game theory, then later in CS classes as the creator of mergesort, cellular automata, Von Neumann architecture, etc.
Wait til you hear about what he did in Math and Physics... Very easy to claim he was the most intelligent human to ever live. Or perhaps he was never human... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
I consider LLMs to be the first successful non-von-neumann architecture in many decades
Re: Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
#59statistics be dammed,I'll flip you for it.....heads I win tails you loose
Re: Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
#60Easy way to get a fair result from an unfair coin toss: Flip the coin twice in a row, in this case starting with the same side facing up both times, so it's equally unfair for both tosses. If you get heads-heads or tails-tails, discard and start over until you get either heads-tails or tails-heads, which have equal probabilities (so you can say something like HT = "heads" and TH = "tails"). This works even if the coi…
If anyone wants to look up why this might work, it's a Whitening transform [0]. I can't find the name of the algorithm itself being describe in the parent but there's more than just that for accomplishing the same thing. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitening_transformation
Thank you. This was useful to learn.