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"Fair" coin flips appear to not be all that fair (arxiv.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by PetDinosaurs to c/technology

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The paper shows some significant evidence that human coin flips are not as fair as I would have expected (plus probably a bunch of people would agree with me). There's always some probability that this happened by chance, but this is pretty low.

Of course, we should be able to build a really accurate coin flipping machine, but I never would have expected such a bias for human flippers.

This is why science is awesome and challenging your ideas is important.

Edit: hopefully this is not too wrong a place, but Lemmy is small, and I didn't know where else I could share such an exciting finding.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the question is, where can you bet on a single coin flip? Maybe because I'm Australian, there's only one day a year you can bet on a (two) coin flip legally here. Everyone else seems to generally understand that coin flips aren't fair for gambling and therefore is illegal.

If this paper was like 'this is how corruption in sports...' rather than 'this is like that magician cup and balls trick' then I'd understand your concern.

But like you said, you don't even have a coin in the house, so the practical side is day to day, perhaps not even once a year, not only are you not deciding on a coin flip, even if you were, you'd (or whomever was flipping it for you) have to learn a technique to see it affect you.

[–] PetDinosaurs 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Aside from National Lampoon Vegas Vacation, it would be in back alleys. It's not a commercial game because it's not exciting enough and it would be easy enough to fool with a machine (also the paper at hand). I just didn't expect it to be so biased for actual people flipping coins.

I seem to have confused people. I just thought there was a different understanding and didn't want to explain gambling.

What I meant to express in "the house always wins" is that in games of chance, you're always at a disadvantage. That's how the house is statistically guaranteed to make money when played at a large scale.

Roulette has red, black, and the green one.

A "fair coin" is a mathematical abstraction. There's zero probability that actual coin flips are "fair", in the mathematical sense. What I was expressing was the fact that this is way larger of an effect than I expected and, over time, this effect will change things that use coin flips.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

National Lampoon Vegas Vacation

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

To be honest I think we have different cultural values here. The way I read this and the way you read it is clearly different. I'm disappointed by how little I had my expectations changed, while you had them moved more.