News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Fair coins tend to land on the side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips. Parent comment

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!

[ Parent | on HN ]
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...

[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]