Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
(Note: r is the probability of obtaining heads when tossing the same coin once.) Plot of the probability density f(r | H = 7, T = 3) = 1320 r 7 (1 − r) 3 with r ranging from 0 to 1. The probability for an unbiased coin (defined for this purpose as one whose probability of coming down heads is somewhere between 45% and 55%)
A fair coin, when tossed, should have an equal chance of landing either side up. In probability theory and statistics, a sequence of independent Bernoulli trials with probability 1/2 of success on each trial is metaphorically called a fair coin. One for which the probability is not 1/2 is called a biased or unfair coin.
Coin flipping, coin tossing, or heads or tails is the practice of throwing a coin in the air and checking which side is showing when it lands, in order to randomly choose between two alternatives. It is a form of sortition which inherently has two possible outcomes.
The probability is sometimes written to distinguish it from other functions and measure P to avoid having to define "P is a probability" and () is short for ({: ()}), where is the event space, is a random variable that is a function of (i.e., it depends upon ), and is some outcome of interest within the domain specified by (say, a particular ...
For example, if a typical coin is tossed and one assumes that it cannot land on its edge, then it can either land showing "heads" or "tails." Because these two outcomes are mutually exclusive (i.e. the coin cannot simultaneously show both heads and tails) and collectively exhaustive (i.e. there are no other possible outcomes not represented ...
This probability is commonly called the Bernoulli measure. [ 2 ] Note that the probability of any specific, infinitely long sequence of coin flips is exactly zero; this is because lim n → ∞ p n = 0 {\displaystyle \lim _{n\to \infty }p^{n}=0} , for any 0 ≤ p < 1 {\displaystyle 0\leq p<1} .
It can be used to represent a (possibly biased) coin toss where 1 and 0 would represent "heads" and "tails", respectively, and p would be the probability of the coin landing on heads (or vice versa where 1 would represent tails and p would be the probability of tails). In particular, unfair coins would have /
Intuitively, if both coins are tossed the same number of times, we should expect the first coin turns up fewer heads than the second one. More specifically, for any fixed k , the probability that the first coin produces at least k heads should be less than the probability that the second coin produces at least k heads.