Quote:
Originally Posted by Garick
This article you're referencing sounds sketchy as hell. For one thing, all statistics about coin flips call for a "fair coin," so the weighting argument is already problematic. Secondly, if it is landing in a predictable way 90% of the time, their coin-flipping machine sucks. If it is intended to say X amount of force in X location on a coin X distance from the floor is the cause of Y output, they should be able to get Y way more than 90% of the time. And if it is supposed to be a randomizer, they obviously aren't flipping the coin hard enough, high enough, or variably enough in power location.
All that said, this is a poker strategy forum, and this discussion isn't about strat, so I'm going to move this to either Science Math and Philosophy or to Probability. You make the call.
As for the article and its sketchiness, I think the point was that if we watch a man flip a coin once, which side comes up SEEMS random. But if we watch him flip that same coin thousands of times, we'll start to see that one side or the other starts coming up more, due to the weight balance of the coin, as well as his flipping technique.
After enough trials, we should have a fairly accurate estimate of the probability that the coin will come up one side or the other, if we know which side was up to start.
I may not be remembering the coin-flipping machine's results perfectly. It may have been higher than 90%. I recall the article also said if you spin a Lincoln Memorial penny, it'll land face down 80%-90% of the time, owing to a weight imbalance, so maybe I was conflating the two.
The takeaway is that the coin landing one side up or the other may be impossible to predict before the first flip, but that doesn't make it random. There's a cause for every outcome, and every outcome has a probability, so nothing is random.