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.

    • PetDinosaurs@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      91·
      9 months ago

      Yeah… I had that thought for a second. Then I geeked out on the math and came to the same conclusion I had before.

      Just as I won’t learn to play poker or count cards, I’m not learning and practicing this.

      I’ve got other things to do with my limited life.

    • nous@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      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.