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.
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.
Right??
Omg. I must learn this.
Shit. I have zero cash in my house.
I tried for a few minutes, before my son got bored and wanted to move on 😜. If you do learn it, let us know!
How old is your son? I imagine I’ll do the same, but this is the only magic trick that I’ve really wanted to learn. My son has some fine motor delays so he won’t be able to do this.
I realized that I’ve interacted with you a few times here, so I ended up looking at your comment history. We seem to share a lot of similar characteristics.
I noticed that you’re trans and had a Q&A. I’m cis-het and I missed that session. I hope that we’ll interact again. I want to understand T as well as I understand LGB. I just don’t know anyone T.
My boy is about 15 now. I miss the times when magic was, well, magic. I love the times we have now, and look forward to the future as well. But, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t miss my little boy.
If you have any Q’s, ask away. I may do another AMA soon, for fun.
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.
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.
Great minds think alike! I just referenced this video in another thread on this post, without having read your comment first!
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.