Re: Math Midget seeks help with odds


"chrystalia" <aprilthebrilliant1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1165824598.899567.196540@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Greetings:

I am not a math professional, but I am hoping someone will help me. My
partner and I are running what could be termed "binary prediction
tests", in that we are testing subjects on their ability to predict the
outcome of coin tosses (heads or tails) and the colors of unseen
playing cards (red or black). The tests are, obviously, designed to
determine the presence or absence of so-called psychic abilities
(precognition, mainly). We have data sets that obviously show non
random affects. The question is, how unlikely are the divergences? For
example, we have one subject who has tossed a total of 222 tails
(longest streak 23 consecutive tails) and 135 heads in a single series
of tosses, and consistently tosses a head/tail ratio of 2:1.

Maybe it is a biassed coin!

If the subject is tossing a 2:1 ration of heads to tails this is nothing to
do with them guessing - either the coin is biassed as I say, or the subject
is good at obtaining a particular result in flipping a coin. This has
nothing to do, in my view, with precognition.

In statistics, a fair coin is one that if it is tossed will randomly will
come up head to tails 50:50.

Anything else is said to be biased.

This is not to say that there cannot be runs of heads or tails but in the
long-term the ration of heads:tails will be 50:50.

Given that you have a "fair" coin you can then study under experimental
conditions the proportion of outcomes (H or T) that an onlooker gets.

Now if the tosser is able to produce a particular result (H or T) then it
seems to me that they could collude with the caller of the result to produce
either more or less H's or T's.

Nick


.

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