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.
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. This is why science is awesome and challenging your ideas is important.
Where are coins flipped multiple times in order to gain such value from doing so? I can only think of 2up being played in Australia, 1 day per year and they don’t flick it with their thumb, so…
Where is the “house” gaining so much?
You can bet on dice and coin flips.
“I bet you a dollar that my coin flip will come up heads?”
This research suggests that this is not only profitable, but can be improved upon.
Edit: so weird. Why would such a simple and correct statement be controversial? I would’ve thought that betting on heads or tails was not this far out of fair coin odds.
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.