Author Topic: Coin Toss: How To Win  (Read 434 times)

hubag bohol

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Coin Toss: How To Win
« on: March 24, 2012, 04:06:11 PM »
People have been tossing coins to settle arguments for as long as coins have existed (or arguments, whichever came later). The Greeks did it, the Romans did it -- hell, the British still flip a coin to decide an election when there's a draw.

Coin tossing is used in numerous contexts (from sport matches to deciding who gets to pick the pizza toppings) because it's a simple, reliable way to choose between two options where each side has the exact same chance of winning. It's like asking God himself to make the decision for you when you can't be bothered to do it yourself.

How to Win:

Well, apparently God isn't as unbiased as we like to think. It turns out that a coin is always more likely to land on the side that's facing up when you flip it (and you should bet accordingly). Why? Because physics, that's why.

A group of researchers at Stanford University calculated the exact odds of a flipped coin landing on either side, and it turns out that there's a 2 percent discrepancy between the two: 51 percent for the side that's facing up versus 49 percent for the side facing down. They achieved this by building a coin-tossing machine, filming it in slow motion with special cameras and carefully analyzing the results.

The reason for the discrepancy is actually pretty simple. Let's say you flip a coin with heads facing up. As it turns in the air, heads will be facing up as many or more times as tails, but never less. Tails, on the other hand, will be facing up as many or fewer times as heads, but never more (since it didn't start out that way). This accounts for the 2 percent difference, which may not seem like a lot to you right now, but try not to drive yourself crazy thinking about it when you're trying to decide something by tossing a coin. By picking the side with more probabilities, you're practically making a decision already.

So maybe you'll end up spinning a coin on its edge ... which is even more biased to one side, it turns out. According to the same study, when you spin a coin, most of the time it will land with the heavier side down. Since heads usually has more s*** on it than tails, some coins can land on tails 80 percent of the time. -- http://www.cracked.com/


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