Study: Coin Flips are NOT 50/50 — take that Crystal Openings 😀

New scientific study last October observed manual coin flips done 350,757 times resulted in 50.8% chance that resulted in landing on same side as their starting position.

From a theory suggesting a 1% difference proposed in 2007.
(link below is from January, also mentioned on the Late Show some days ago)

Has to do with slight wobble in it's rotational spin, blah blah scientific details.

I can see a near 1% difference along a standard deviation curve being realistic on a 1000 case basis. But on 350,000, wow.

So for everyone getting bad pulls from crystals, new ammunition to think it was based on the angle of your finger/stylus at the point of your spin, the amount of pressure being applied to your screen, the slight directional difference of your swipe when doing manual spins, being under a New Moon (triple bonus during Eclipse), whether a blonde or a brunette is doing the spin, etc.

(Remember there used to be a theory many, many years ago up here, that if you swiped out from a certain corner of the screen, that would increase your odds of a good champ. Lol. )

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-destroy-illusion-that-coin-toss-flips-are-50-50/

fyi, @DNA3000

Comments

Squirrelguy

....I mean.... but statistically they're still 50/50. Right?

*mumbles the ANOVA table to myself in a corner wile rocking back and forth questioning every probability*

DNA3000

I would presume coin flips are not perfectly even for the simple reason that coins are not symmetric. If coins were actual casino game equipment, they would almost certainly not pass the kinds of balance tests they subject dice to. Also, anyone who has been at a craps table knows that for a throw of the dice to be valid they must be thrown hard enough to bounce off the back stop. This attempts to inject enough random disturbance into the dice to make their rolls more random (and to also prevent known ways to rig the dice by the thrower using techniques such as sliding the dice while appearing to roll them). People typically don't flip coins in a similarly careful manner.

Beyond that there is the effect the article mentions, which is an effect that I've heard discussed for decades, that coins do not revolve perfectly symmetrically in the air when flipped by the average person. The most "fair" coin toss might actually be the ones performed by NFL officials during games. Tossing the coin in to the air and letting it land on the ground might actually be statistically more random than the traditional coin flip.

(Remember there used to be a theory many, many years ago up here, that if you swiped out from a certain corner of the screen, that would increase your odds of a good champ. Lol. )

There are people who still fervently believe this was true, and think the people who believe this to be fantasy are themselves simply uninformed. However, crystal rigging in this manner was not just a delusion, it was completely impossible. Crystal openings happened then and now at the servers, not the game client. The servers have no idea what you are doing in the game client. They only know when you decide to open the crystal by pop or tap, and then send your game client the result. It was and is no more possible to influence crystal openings by doing anything with your game client than it is to influence what happens during a football game while sitting in your seat throwing things at the TV.

I remember hearing an interview with a player who claimed this was so much of a thing back in the day that there were people who actually *charged* other players to open their crystals for them to get better chances at better drops. I believe they actually said something to the effect that "most of the time they could get better drops more often." Which almost makes me sorry for those people who paid for those services. Almost.

I should also point out that modding the game has been a thing since almost forever, and if crystals were affected by anything the game client did, modders could basically cause crystals to always drop exactly what they wanted. Which is how we know this was never a possibility.

willrun4adonut

anyone who has been at a craps table knows that for a throw of the dice to be valid they must be thrown hard enough to bounce off the back stop. This attempts to inject enough random disturbance into the dice to make their rolls more random (and to also prevent known ways to rig the dice by the thrower using techniques such as sliding the dice while appearing to roll them).

I never knew this, and I have lived in Reno, Neveda, my entire life

Kerneas

"It isn't difficult to prevent this bias from influencing your coin-toss matches; simply concealing the coin's starting position before flipping it should do the trick. Alternatively, you can do away with flipping altogether by jiggling a coin between your curved palms."

From the article - so basically unless you flip conventionally, it really is 50%

Jack2634