143
"Fair" coin flips appear to not be all that fair
(arxiv.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
143 points (93.9% liked)
Technology
59298 readers
1643 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I think the question is, where can you bet on a single coin flip? Maybe because I'm Australian, there's only one day a year you can bet on a (two) coin flip legally here. Everyone else seems to generally understand that coin flips aren't fair for gambling and therefore is illegal.
If this paper was like 'this is how corruption in sports...' rather than 'this is like that magician cup and balls trick' then I'd understand your concern.
But like you said, you don't even have a coin in the house, so the practical side is day to day, perhaps not even once a year, not only are you not deciding on a coin flip, even if you were, you'd (or whomever was flipping it for you) have to learn a technique to see it affect you.
Aside from National Lampoon Vegas Vacation, it would be in back alleys. It's not a commercial game because it's not exciting enough and it would be easy enough to fool with a machine (also the paper at hand). I just didn't expect it to be so biased for actual people flipping coins.
I seem to have confused people. I just thought there was a different understanding and didn't want to explain gambling.
What I meant to express in "the house always wins" is that in games of chance, you're always at a disadvantage. That's how the house is statistically guaranteed to make money when played at a large scale.
Roulette has red, black, and the green one.
A "fair coin" is a mathematical abstraction. There's zero probability that actual coin flips are "fair", in the mathematical sense. What I was expressing was the fact that this is way larger of an effect than I expected and, over time, this effect will change things that use coin flips.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
National Lampoon Vegas Vacation
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
To be honest I think we have different cultural values here. The way I read this and the way you read it is clearly different. I'm disappointed by how little I had my expectations changed, while you had them moved more.