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.
“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…)
with their spare change
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.
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.
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.
Where…?
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.
I read the beginning of the article. It confirmed my gut feeling. But I certainly didn’t run 300k coin flips to check lol
🤗
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.
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Now I wanna know if I can get better at landing on the same side on purpose…
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.
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.
I have actually tried and practised that when I was a kid :-)
Humans inherently create patterns and routine in their actions. It’s why on roulette wheels they change the direction and the size of the ball regularly to prevent the spinners from pattern spinning.
They don’t all inherently choose to make it land on the up facing side. In fact, I believe this study is not even true. I call shenanigans.
I look forward to your article explaining how you used the scientific method to provide counter evidence to their study.
