A stats professor used to set his class this exercise as a warm-up. She divided the class into two groups. One group was told to each flip a coin some n number of times and record the number of times it came up heads and tails. The other group was told to each imagine that they were flipping a coin and write down an n sequence of heads and tails. She would leave the room whilst they were doing this so that there was no way for her to know which person was in each group. After checking all the papers she would effortlessly divide the papers into two groups. How? Because the people who were faking it were invariably too careful not to include long runs of heads and tails. The truly random data invariably contained several long runs of the same type.
It's important to remember this when you hit a losing run (or winning run). So that you don;t become too despondent (or euphoric). And this is especially true if you're betting the shorties and hit a bad streak. Which I have just been doing on the football. It's important to remember that a run of 5 or more losers is to be expected.
In any given 100 flips of a coin there is a 54% probability of there being 6 heads in a row, and in 1000 flips of a coin there's a 99.7% probability of there being 6 heads in a row. In any given 100 flips of a coin there is a 32% chance of there being 8 heads in a row.
It's important to remember this when you hit a losing run (or winning run). So that you don;t become too despondent (or euphoric). And this is especially true if you're betting the shorties and hit a bad streak. Which I have just been doing on the football. It's important to remember that a run of 5 or more losers is to be expected.
In any given 100 flips of a coin there is a 54% probability of there being 6 heads in a row, and in 1000 flips of a coin there's a 99.7% probability of there being 6 heads in a row. In any given 100 flips of a coin there is a 32% chance of there being 8 heads in a row.
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