Math Is Fun Forum

cshell

Guest

urgent

50% probability of flip of head or tails.  A coin flip generated 7 heads after 10 flips.  Why?

mathsyperson

Moderator

Registered: 2005-06-22

Posts: 4,900

Re: urgent

Probability only helps you guess what will happen, not what actually does.
Any amount of heads could come up in 10 flips, it's just that 5 is the most likely amount to come up.

You can see that trusting probability too much is silly by thinking about what would happen if there had been 9 flips instead.
Probability says that in this case, heads will come up 4.5 times, which is clearly nonsense.

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Why did the vector cross the road?
It wanted to be normal.

Macy

Guest

Re: urgent

another way to explain "why?" is we look at in the long run perhaps 10,000 flips, the probability of getting head is always 0.5 with assumption that is a fair coin. So within 10 flips that is not enough for the probalility to converge.