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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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[–] 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.