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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.
It is based on the coin flip used widely in sports and other situations where it is required to give two parties the same chance of winning. Either a specially designed chip or more usually a simple currency coin is used, although the latter might be slightly "unfair" due to an asymmetrical weight distribution, which might cause one state to ...
Simulation illustrating the law of large numbers. Each frame, a coin that is red on one side and blue on the other is flipped, and a dot is added in the corresponding column. A pie chart shows the proportion of red and blue so far. Notice that while the proportion varies significantly at first, it approaches 50% as the number of trials increases.
In the case of flipping a coin, flipping a head and flipping a tail are also mutually exclusive events. Both outcomes cannot occur for a single trial (i.e., when a coin is flipped only once). The probability of flipping a head and the probability of flipping a tail can be added to yield a probability of 1: 1/2 + 1/2 =1. [5]
In theoretical studies, the assumption that a coin is fair is often made by referring to an ideal coin. John Edmund Kerrich performed experiments in coin flipping and found that a coin made from a wooden disk about the size of a crown and coated on one side with lead landed heads (wooden side up) 679 times out of 1000. [ 1 ]
When flipping a fair coin 21 times, the outcome is equally likely to be 21 heads as 20 heads and then 1 tail. These two outcomes are equally as likely as any of the other combinations that can be obtained from 21 flips of a coin. All of the 21-flip combinations will have probabilities equal to 0.5 21, or 1 in 2,097,152. Assuming that a change ...
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Persi Warren Diaconis (/ ˌ d aɪ ə ˈ k oʊ n ɪ s /; born January 31, 1945) is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician. [2] [3] He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University.