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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.
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
(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%)
While a run of five heads has a probability of 1 / 32 = 0.03125 (a little over 3%), the misunderstanding lies in not realizing that this is the case only before the first coin is tossed. After the first four tosses in this example, the results are no longer unknown, so their probabilities are at that point equal to 1 (100%).
Where the money goes. Some well-known fountains can collect thousands of dollars in coins each year. According to an NBC report from 2016, the Trevi Fountain accumulated about $1.5 million in ...
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If a cheat has altered a coin to prefer one side over another (a biased coin), the coin can still be used for fair results by changing the game slightly. John von Neumann gave the following procedure: [4] Toss the coin twice. If the results match, start over, forgetting both results. If the results differ, use the first result, forgetting the ...
[note 1] [1] [2] A simple example is the tossing of a fair (unbiased) coin. Since the coin is fair, the two outcomes ("heads" and "tails") are both equally probable; the probability of "heads" equals the probability of "tails"; and since no other outcomes are possible, the probability of either "heads" or "tails" is 1/2 (which could also be ...