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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.
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.
(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%)
The probability of getting two heads in two tosses is 1 / 4 (one in four) and the probability of getting three heads in three tosses is 1 / 8 (one in eight). In general, if A i is the event where toss i of a fair coin comes up heads, then:
Player A selects a sequence of heads and tails (of length 3 or larger), and shows this sequence to player B. Player B then selects another sequence of heads and tails of the same length. Subsequently, a fair coin is tossed until either player A's or player B's sequence appears as a consecutive subsequence of the coin toss outcomes. The player ...
Feller's coin-tossing constants are a set of numerical constants which describe asymptotic probabilities that in n independent tosses of a fair coin, no run of k consecutive heads (or, equally, tails) appears. William Feller showed [1] that if this probability is written as p(n,k) then
The first time heads appears, the game ends and the player wins whatever is the current stake. Thus the player wins 2 dollars if heads appears on the first toss, 4 dollars if tails appears on the first toss and heads on the second, 8 dollars if tails appears on the first two tosses and heads on the third, and so on.
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 ...