"Fair" coin flips appear to not be all that fair

PetDinosaurs@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 145 points –
arxiv.org

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.

42

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

My favorite part is this:

Funding The authors have no funding to declare, and conducted this research in their spare time.

"Funding: my mom gave me the coins out of her car cupholder"

I, too, was a poor grad student.

At that time I didn't have a child to suck the life out of me. Just a dissertation.

(My hypothesis is that the child is worse, but my wife won't let me conduct double blind, placebo controlled studies. Fortunately, we didn't have twins...)

It's just bizarre how high quality this evidence is. It's probably because it's so cheap to collect this data, and other science nerds are also science geeks like me.

Actual video of this many tests. Just data orgasm.

here it's not ready yet.