5 ms·
How could you bound the time if you knew the exact distribution? Like say it has heads probability p?
by throwaway613834 9y ago
How could you bound the time if you knew the exact distribution? Like say it has heads probability p?
- contravariant 9y agoYeah I may have spoken to soon. There's a minimum bound, but now that I think of it there's generally no reason to believe that any subset of outcomes for any bounded number of flips would have a probability of exactly 1/2. In fact this is impossible if p is transcendental. The set of p for which there is a method to do it in finitely many flips is quite interesting though. It is bigger than the irrational numbers (it contains sqrt(1/2)), but smaller than all algebraic numbers. At the very least you'd need 1/2 ∈ Z[p], but that might not be enough.