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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.
Flipping a coin leads to two outcomes that are almost equally likely. Up or down? Flipping a brass tack leads to two outcomes that are not equally likely. In some sample spaces, it is reasonable to estimate or assume that all outcomes in the space are equally likely (that they occur with equal probability). For example, when tossing an ordinary ...
(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%)
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. In theoretical studies, the assumption that a coin is fair is often made by referring to an ideal coin.
A representation of the possible outcomes of flipping a fair coin four times in terms of the number of heads. As can be seen, the probability of getting exactly two heads in four flips is 6/16 = 3/8, which matches the calculations. For this experiment, let a heads be defined as a success and a tails as a failure.
For example, if x represents a sequence of coin flips, then the associated Bernoulli sequence is the list of natural numbers or time-points for which the coin toss outcome is heads. So defined, a Bernoulli sequence Z x {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{x}} is also a random subset of the index set, the natural numbers N {\displaystyle \mathbb {N} } .
In probability theory, an experiment or trial (see below) is any procedure that can be infinitely repeated and has a well-defined set of possible outcomes, known as the sample space. [1] An experiment is said to be random if it has more than one possible outcome, and deterministic if it has only one.
Assuming that a change in the probability will occur as a result of the outcome of prior flips is incorrect because every outcome of a 21-flip sequence is as likely as the other outcomes. In accordance with Bayes' theorem, the likely outcome of each flip is the probability of the fair coin, which is 1 / 2 .