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Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)

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392 points seanhunter | 2 comments | 19 Nov 24 09:03 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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noman-land ◴[19 Nov 24 17:16 UTC] No.42185811[source]▶
Haven't read the paper yet but this is so weird because when I was a kid I noticed this phenomenon myself. I noticed I could reliably flip a coin such that when it landed it would land on the same side as it was flipped from. I was getting like 80% accuracy and I didn't even know what I was doing to achieve it. I could just usually feel when I flipped it that I "did it right". I used it a couple times to win coin toss decisions but then sorta forgot about it and relegated it to a statistical fluke. It would be amazing of there was some merit to it.
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cbsmith ◴[19 Nov 24 17:20 UTC] No.42185870[source]▶
There's a "fair coin", and then there's a "fair flip". It's actually pretty difficult to do a truly "fair flip".
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1. lupire ◴[20 Nov 24 13:09 UTC] No.42193615[source]▶
A fair coin is just a coin. There is no such thing as an unfair coin, unless its third side is so huge that it can't be reasonably called a coin.
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2. cbsmith ◴[20 Nov 24 17:35 UTC] No.42196304[source]▶
You're going to have a lot of fans amongst con men. ;-)

Unfair coins very much do exist: https://izbicki.me/blog/how-to-create-an-unfair-coin-and-pro...