Coin flip: Difference between revisions

A coin flip -- the act of spinning a coin into the air with your thumb and then catching it in your hand -- is often considered the epitome of a chance event. It features as a ubiquitous example in textbooks on probability theory and statistics, and constituted a game of chance ('capita aut navia' -- 'heads of ships') already in Roman times.

 

According to the standard model of coin flipping, the flip is a deterministic process. The perceived randomness originates from small fluctuations in the initial conditions -- regarding starting position, configuration, upward force, and angular momentum -- combined with narrow boundaries on the outcome space. Therefore, the standard model predicts that when people flip a fair coin, the probability of it landing heads is 50%.