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If anybody's curious about the math, it's pretty simple. Assume p is the probability of flipping heads. Then, pp is the probability of flipping 2 heads, (1-p)(
by chillee 9y ago
If anybody's curious about the math, it's pretty simple.
Assume p is the probability of flipping heads. Then, pp is the probability of flipping 2 heads, (1-p)(1-p) is the probability of flipping 2 tails, (1-p)p is the probability of flipping tails then heads, and p(1-p) is the probability of flipping heads then tails.
So, basically p^2 + (1-p)^2 + p(1-p) + (1-p)p = 1.
Then, we ignore the first 2 terms (since that's when the results match and we start over), and we're only left with the p(1-p) case and the (1-p)p case. These are equally likely, and the first coin is heads in the first case and tails in the second.
- mlevental 9y agoyou know what always screwed me up in stats? conditional probability. your expansion makes perfect sense (you've constructed a new measure) but I'm left here wondering if just dropping the first two terms is really the right way to find the conditional density (conditioned on the first two flips coming out the same).