Moderated Coin Flipper
No... it oscillates above and below and sometimes 50% and it is sometimes in favor Tails others in favor of Heads and it gets lower difference the more tosses but sometimes gets higher... there is just no rhyme or reason... it is just indeterministically random.
Look at the results in this post
or better still ... use the app... either one
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I just modified the app (only for me) to report the Edge landing condition.
And I just let it go for 1 BILLION flips... it took all of 12:34 minutes....
How many Edge landings do you think there were in 1 BILLION flips???
Try to guess before you look at the result.
And I just let it go for 1 BILLION flips... it took all of 12:34 minutes....
How many Edge landings do you think there were in 1 BILLION flips???
Try to guess before you look at the result.
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marting
Illuminator
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Thermal
August Member
Ok I'm a little lost here. You enter a number over ten and the screen gives you percentages floating around 50% for heads and tails. What...is this about?
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Let's see you do better... ok! I would be interested in what you come up with.
You misunderstand. I think simulating a literal physical coin is a waste of time for this purpose. You were fine excluding the edge case.
On the other hand, I have grave doubts about the wisdom of trying to use pseudorandom events to prove anything about probabilistic outcomes of naturally occurring events.
You are right of course that PRNGs are only a SIMULATION of the randomness of reality.
However... you are wrong that it is not wise to use them for the purposes of SIMULATING naturally occurring randomness.
Simulations are used extensively in numerous fields of science and humanities... although it depends on the requirements of the application, most of the time PRNGs are used and are sufficient. And if the application requires a TRNG then PRNGs are still used anyway just with an added seeding using a hardware source of randomness.
Nevertheless... although you are assuredly right that PRNGs are not the real randomness of a natural random event... you are still wrong about the wisdom of using PRNGs as a SIMULATION to EXPERIMENT and ESTIMATE and RESEARCH such naturally occurring randomness without having to spend $$$ and prohibitive real time.
I suggest you look into the benefits and wisdom of simulating natural events in all sorts of fields of science and humanities. (Here is just ONE example of a very serious application)
When you specify 10 or any number X (within 10 to 10,1000,000 inclusive)... then click the Flip button... you are telling the app to simulate flipping a coin X times.
Each toss results in a H or T (or Edge in the v2 of the app).
So the app tallies up the number of H and number of T and calculates the %H and %T and shows you those values in a row in the table.
The app also calculates a running average of each time you click the Flip button and shows that above the table.
So you can perform X flips N times and see the average of averages, as well as the average of each go (in the rows).
You can use this to see how the %H and %T never really settle down to 50-50 regardless of how many times you flip the coin.... whether you flip 10 flips a go for 1000,000 goes or flip 1000,000 flips a go for 10 goes, or 100,000 flips a go for 100 goes etc.... and also see how the results even though they are 10,000,000 flips whichever combination, are still not the same.
And so on... in other words you can use the App to play with all sorts of combinations and see how the %T and %H behave.
.
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Thermal
August Member
Right...right, I get all that. Let me clarify:
1. The app claims to be a coin flipper. Obviously, it's not. It's a program that presumably thinks it's generating a random outcome of two (and in V2, 3) possibilities. Exactly how it is simulating this is crucial to interpreting the output data, which I doubt has anything whatsoever to do with the mechanics of a physical coin flip by a human.
2. We know that the outcome would be floating around 50/50 (and absolutely not be exactly 50/50 ever again in V2 after the first edge flip was entered). This would be entirely predictable in advance.
3.We have no reason whatsoever to expect the outcome to be precisely 50% at the end of any given series. In a real life flipping scenario of 10 million flips, an actual precise 50/50 was probably hit multiple times in the sequence, then was off literally in the next flip. For instance, I typed in 20 and actually got an exact 50%. It would not have been exactly 50 on the flip before, or the flip after. It literally couldn't possibly have been.
4. So I have no idea why chosing the random number of 10 million or whatever should be expected to show any precise output except floating around the 50/50 line, back and forth. Add this with whatever the app was programmed to output (which has little to do with the physical mechanics of coin flipping), and I ask again: what...is this about?
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jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
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In and of itself, reliance on cryptographic methods doesn't make a pseudorandom number sequence any more or less random. For more insight to the types of statistical tests a pseudorandom number generator should pass, I refer you to Donald Knuth's classic, The Art of Programming, Volume 2.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
As far as I can tell, Leumas's v1 simulator does in fact show the percentage of heads trending asymptotically towards 50% over the series.
jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
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Ironically, that is what a good pseudorandom generator must do. Leumas' trials speak to the quality of the generator he is using and nothing at all to how coins behave.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I think there's a distinction between being able to pseudorandomly simulate some natural phenomenon, to a close enough approximation for some practical purpose...
... And believing that your pseudorandom simulation tells you accurately and precisely how that natural phenomenon actually works in nature.
Your pseudorandom two-case coin flipper certainly seems adequate for a wide range of dispassionate selector applications in the real world. But we shouldn't be fooled into thinking it's an accurate description of the underlying physics that produce probabilistic binary results in some natural system.
Read the OP....
Nevertheless I am glad to see you objecting to pseudo-randomness in defense of natural randomness.... which is another thing that this is about.
Great... so you are not on the side of those who deny randomness in the natural world.... QED!!!
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No it does not.... you are arrantly wrong as evinced by only actually using the app which you clearly have not.
Nevertheless I am glad to see you objecting to pseudo-randomness in defense of natural randomness.... which is another thing that this is about.
Great... so you are not on the side of those who deny randomness in the natural world.... QED!!!
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theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Ah... my mistake.... so you are on the side of those who deny randomness in the natural world.... right?
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I'm agnostic about randomness in the natural world. Mainly because I don't see any good way for us to examine it.
For example, I don't think you or anyone else can reach valid conclusions about randomness in the natural world by examining pseudorandomness in the artificial world.
Your pseudorandom coin flipper does nothing to alleviate my agnosticism about randomness in the natural world.
jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
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I cannot tell from you post how much of your negativity is directed at theprestige or at myself. Be that as it may, though, what you have is a model of how you believe a coin behaves when flipped. You have coded that model, and you have used it to simulate the outcomes of various sequences of coin tosses.
The quality of those simulations are intimately tied to the quality of the underlying model and also the pseudorandom number generator function upon which it relies.
Are you trying to say anything other than, anything more than that?
Ah well... then anything you have to say in regards to the topic of randomness is an Argumentum ad Ignorantiam.
Go get some KNOWLEDGE so that you can then talk about the subject out of knowledge not out of lack of it.