Re:Fair coins tend to land on the side they started: Evidenc...
by chongli on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @01:26PM
(#42186614)
Yes and what immediately jumps out to me as a source of bias is that they asked this small group of 48 coin flippers to flip thousands of times each. I would’ve thought it would be obvious that when you ask people to do something thousands of times they might do it in a different (and biased) way than someone doing that thing only once.
Get a hundred thousand people to flip a coin once each and then see what happens!
Re:Fair coins tend to land on the side they started: Evidenc...
by dfxm12 on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @02:53PM
(#42187402)
Get a hundred thousand people to flip a coin once each and then see what happens!
Of all the stats we collect in sports, I wonder if someone has info on coin tosses in sports like American Football, Tennis, etc. I wonder if there are even rules regulating how a coin should be tossed in different sports...
Re:Fair coins tend to land on the side they started: Evidenc...
by skykooler on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @08:00AM
(#42193559)
Having stats on the outcome of coin tosses in sports wouldn't help, because it's unlikely that the state of the coin before flipping was recorded.
Re:Fair coins tend to land on the side they started: Evidenc...
by fluoridation on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @02:08PM
(#42186986)
What's more, from the numbers cited it sounds like they had 48 people do nothing but flip coins for 8 hours (avg. 15 flips/min). Whether continuous or with breaks, there's no way you won't become seriously consistent. 7000 flips is many more flips most people will perform in their entire lives.
Re:Fair coins tend to land on the side they started: Evidenc...
by dylan604 on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @02:58PM
(#42187453)
In some circles, they'd make a post about how their "AI" flipped a coin 8000 times.
Waiting for the HNer that likes electronics hacking to Show HN: My coin flipping robot I built over a weekend for consistent flips.
It sounds like what they were intending to study is the actual variance that is introduced, on average, by imperfections in throws conducted by humans. Unless that's mistaken, it's a fair point to consider the n=48 here. Did they discover an average that can be generalized to humans or just to those 48?