The paper shows some significant evidence that human coin flips are not as fair as I would have expected (plus probably a bunch of people would agree with me). There’s always some probability that this happened by chance, but this is pretty low.
Of course, we should be able to build a really accurate coin flipping machine, but I never would have expected such a bias for human flippers.
This is why science is awesome and challenging your ideas is important.
Edit: hopefully this is not too wrong a place, but Lemmy is small, and I didn’t know where else I could share such an exciting finding.
My favorite part is this:
Funding The authors have no funding to declare, and conducted this research in their spare time.
tl;dr:
The standard model of coin flipping was extended by Persi Diaconis [12] who proposed that when people flip a ordinary coin, they introduce a small degree of ‘precession’ or wobble—a change in the direction of the axis of rotation throughout the coin’s trajectory. According to the Diaconis model, precession causes the coin to spend more time in the air with the initial side facing up. Consequently, the coin has a higher chance of landing on the same side as it started (i.e., ‘same-side bias’).
“Higher chance” being 50.77% to land on the same side it started from. But this varies by person; apparently some people introduce more precession than others. But even if you could figure out how to do it reliably, I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
The illusion of a coin flipping in the air allows those that have mastered the act to get near 100% precision.
Crazy how simple and obvious that seems after you see it, but I never would have suspected it if someone did it right in front of me.
I tried for a few minutes, before my son got bored and wanted to move on 😜. If you do learn it, let us know!
I’m curious why you don’t think this is significant?
This is a pretty high house edge (or whatever you want to call it) for a game that seems the most fair as possible.
No casino games are that fair.
As is discussed elsewhere in this thread, you could probably practice and get that higher.
Where are coins flipped multiple times in order to gain such value from doing so? I can only think of 2up being played in Australia, 1 day per year and they don’t flick it with their thumb, so…
Where is the “house” gaining so much?
You can bet on dice and coin flips.
“I bet you a dollar that my coin flip will come up heads?”
This research suggests that this is not only profitable, but can be improved upon.
Edit: so weird. Why would such a simple and correct statement be controversial? I would’ve thought that betting on heads or tails was not this far out of fair coin odds.
I remember it feeling this way as a kid. That coins tend to land on the same side they start on.
No! Bad treefrog.
If it “feels like” something, you’re probably fooling yourself.
Hard evidence. The easiest person to fool is yourself.
Edit: people, please don’t down vote treefrog. They are learning, and I am joking.
Be nice. This place is way toxic. I’m not sure how much more I can handle it.
Jokes on me! I doubt most of my decisions and the logic that lead up to them!
Evidenced based research ftw, though.
If you’re still young, careful about too much imposter syndrome.
It took me until some reasonably extreme events for me to acknowledge that I was smart.
I’m with you, i used to try influence what i wanted by catching it.
If i wanted what i had flipped from i caught it palm up and then revealed. If i wanted the opposite i caught it and then revealed it onto my other hand.
As i got older i wouldn’t let people catch the coin only let it hit the ground and bounce around.
I remember the opposite: heads always felt like “right way up” to us, but the result was almost always tails no matter who flipped it. To the extent that it still feels like the heads/tails percentage is the only positive version of the 50-50-90 rule, and I will never choose anything else.
Probably confirmation bias. But I wonder if the people in my family are wobblier than others.
Now I wanna know if I can get better at landing on the same side on purpose…
I suspect you can, if there is a bias when no effort is applied I suspect you can train to increase it. I can think of two main factors at play - how fast the coin is rotating and how long it remains in the air. Both of which are under your control and I suspect you can train to become more reliable for though it might take a lot of effort. Or you can just learn to do this in 10 mins. Who is going to know the difference? It is cheating either way.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Or you can just learn to do this in 10 mins
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I have actually tried and practised that when I was a kid :-)
