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

Comments

• Squirrelguy Member Posts: 2,654 ★★★★★

  April 10

  ....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*

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• DNA3000 Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,739 Guardian

  April 11

  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.

  SummonerNR said:

  (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.

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• willrun4adonut Member Posts: 4,786 ★★★★★

  April 11

  DNA3000 said:

  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

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• Kerneas Member Posts: 3,831 ★★★★★

  April 11

  "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%

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• Jack2634 Member Posts: 930 ★★★

  April 11

  
  

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