Topic: Fair and unbiased coins have a bias to land on the same side they started - page 2. (Read 314 times)

Can't believe some people actually research this, where they provide detailed documentation including video of tossing coin and image of all coins used as tossing (i checked few random image and video).


Although if you visit casino, you still at disadvantage due to house edge and other fees.


In terms of entropy, shouldn't the difference (between ~0.508 and ~0.492) is extremely small? CMIIW.

From quantum physic's perspective, all the coin flips are landing on both sides at the same time, but who really decides which one of the outcomes become our reality?

A simpler example, in fall seasons usually trees lose their leaves, is it really random when they drop one by one whilst there are infinite possibilities of when they drop down, land where and on which side exactly.? 

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Just use a secure random generator, ignore tossing coins, and don't reuse addresses.

We control absolutely nothing, we are just given options to choose from.

A group of researchers carried out a test to investigate the randomness of fair coin flips.

They collected 350,757 coin flips, recorded the results, and concluded that when a person tosses a coin in the air, it has about a 51% probability of landing on the same side it started. This same-side bias varies and is different from person to person. Some have almost none or very little bias, while others display a more significant bias.

The researchers believe the bias comes from the rotations and wobbliness of the coin, which causes it to land on the same side more often than not.

They posted this data in support of their hypothesis:

Their research also confirmed that the coin is equally likely to land on both heads and tails if those were the starting positions (the side that was up). They didn't record a bias that one side is more likely to end on the same side than the other.
 

They carried out the test with 48 people who used 46 different coins and denominations. The total number of coin flips was 350,757. The results show 178,078 landings on the same side.

The researchers did mention a concern they had. The people who participated in the test were aware of the main hypothesis they were testing. With that in mind, manipulations or attempts to manipulate the results to either prove or disapprove the theory are possible.


The source also mentions the scope of this same-side bias in a betting scenario.
If you bet $1 on the result of a coin toss to get $2 if you predict correctly or lose the $1 if you predict wrong, you would earn an average of $19 after 1000 coin flips. But knowing the starting position of the coin is essential.

Could these findings lower the security of seeds generated from coin tosses, considering that the starting positions of the coins aren't known to a third party?
I remember that o_e_l_e_o recommended using von Neumann's unbiased coin flipping algorithm in a similar discussion from a few weeks ago. One more reason to use this algorithm if coin tossing is your system of generating seeds. 
 

Sources used:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.04153.pdf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04153