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I remember an experiment in high school math of some variety. The teacher had us all "guess" what twenty coin flips would look like. The longest any streak any
by sharkweek 8y ago
I remember an experiment in high school math of some variety.
The teacher had us all "guess" what twenty coin flips would look like. The longest any streak any student wrote on their paper was maybe 4-ish in a row or something.
He then had us all actually flip the coins and record the results. One student had like 11 in a row, most hit a streak of somewhere between 5-8 of the same result.
Lesson learned, we're really bad at guessing 50/50 streaks.
- saagarjha 8y agoEmpirically, you should (~85% of the time) be seeing a streak of about 3-6; anything 8 or larger has a probability of about 1 in 20.
- hopler 8y agoTo a rough approximation, 20 coin flips gives you 16 chances to get a 1/16 probability event of 5 in a row of heads or tails, so the average number of 5-streaks is 1 per student. With 32 kids a class, add 5 more to the streak length to expect to see.