Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips · HackerPapers discussions

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips — HN submission

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:59:47 GMT

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips — mentioned by rolph

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 19:41:14 GMT

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips [revised 10 Oct 2023] https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04153

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips — mentioned by westurner

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 22:40:16 GMT

"51% Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss [pdf]" (2007) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38725981 "Researchers flip coins 350k times to find out if odds are 50/50" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37958554 : "Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips" (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04153

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Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips — mentioned by GuB-42

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 16:28:52 GMT

Just for curiosity sake, I looked at the standard RNG in C# and it is indeed flawed, but probably not enough to be seen unless you are doing formal tests. In [1] it says that numbers have a 0.5034 probability of being odd due to rounding errors in the algorithm that picks a number in a range, which is unacceptable for a simulation, but may actually be better than a real coin toss [2]. The raw RNG is also flawed but not that badly [3] [1] https://fuglede.dk/en/blog/bias-in-net-rng/ [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04153 [3] https://gist.github.com/fuglede/772402ecc3997ada82a03ce65361...

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Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips — mentioned by avipars

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 06:57:50 GMT

They actually flipped a coin >350,000 times and the paper has 49 authors. Based on the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.04153.pdf, they recorded video footage of each coin flip I thought they would have run a computer simulation instead.

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Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips — mentioned by fbartos

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 09:06:45 GMT

About a year ago, we embarked on a quest to answer one of the most intriguing questions: If you flip a fair coin and catch it in hand, what's the probability it lands on the same side it started? Today, we are finally ready to share the results. Thanks to my friends, collaborators, and even strangers from the internet, we collected flippin 350,757 coin flips. We ran several "Coin Tossing Marathons" (e.g., https://youtu.be/3xNg51mv-fk?si=o2E3hKa-ReXodOmc) and spent countless hours flipping coins. In short, we found overwhelming evidence for a "same-side" bias predicted by Diaconis, Holmes, and…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips — HN submission

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 09:06:45 GMT

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started

377 points; 265 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.