Heads or tails are not fair as expected, great experience shows | The best thing on the internet

Pasta or pizza tonight? Who can move first in the game? You’ve undoubtedly solved a dilemma by tossing: placing a coin on your thumb and then tossing it up. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands recently tested how fair this is. Their experience shows that if you place the heads of coins on top of your thumb and then toss them in the air, heads will often land upwards. The same is true the other way around: if you throw a tail up, it will often land on the tail.

To reach this result, scientists tossed different types of coins 350,000 times. Sometimes they kept itCoin toss Marathon, where they tossed coins in teams for 12 hours straight. Statisticians have calculated that the probability that your coin will end up with a tail if it starts with a tail is 51 percent. If you start with tails, there is also a 51 percent chance that you will land on tails. In other words, there’s no chance Equally And you have a 1 percent impact on the outcome.

Percy Diaconis, a statistician at Stanford University in California, has previously conducted research into how fair this lottery method is. He tied dental floss to the coins and then used the number of turns of the string to read the number of turns the coin had made. He discovered that coins tended to fluctuate in the air, and that in addition to the speed of the coin’s rotation and the upward vertical force, this would also affect the outcome.

The researchers from the University of Amsterdam informed Diakonis of their findings, who responded “delighted” when they provided him with the results. “He predicted exactly 51% based on the theory,” Erik Jan Wagen Makers, a professor at the University of Amsterdam, told De Volkskrant. Wagenmakers was one of the study’s authors.

The professor also pointed out that all the researchers conducted the study in their spare time, and therefore the experiment was not paid for with Dutch taxpayers’ money.