11 ms·
Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)
- seanhunter 2y agoThere's a nice presentation of the paper here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QjgvbvFoQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QjgvbvFoQA In essence the effect comes from "precession" - the tendency of the flip to not be purely vertical but to have some wobble/angular momentum which causes it to flip in such a way as to spend longer on one side than the other. Depending on the technique this will have a greater or lesser effect on the fairness of the coin toss, ranging from about p_same = 0.508 for the best technique to one person in the study actually exhibiting 0.6 over a large sample which is staggeringly unlikely if the toss was purely fair. In the extreme, it shows in the video a magician doing a trick toss using precession that looks as if it's flipping but does not in fact change sides at all, purely rotating in the plane of the coin and wobbling a bit. The video is quite a nice one for setting out how hypothesis testing works.
- yread 2y agolink to the "wobble flip" trick https://youtu.be/-QjgvbvFoQA?t=325 https://youtu.be/-QjgvbvFoQA?t=325
- pinko 2y agoI think you accidentally linked to the same video as the parent comment... I bet this is the video you mean? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-L7KOjyDrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-L7KOjyDrE
- swores 2y agoThey linked to the same video, but to a specific timestamp within it - by adding '?t=325' to the URL, which tells Youtube to play the video from 5m25s rather than from the beginning.
- Vecr 2y agoAh man, please use Bayesian statistics there... Well, the presenter says he doesn't know much about statistics.
- drcwpl 2y agoThis can be really relevant in various fields, statistics, gambling, and decision-making. I like the fact that they imply the importance of considering potential biases in seemingly random events.
- seanhunter 2y agoThe paper does use Bayesian statistics. Presenter is a pure maths PhD.
- Vecr 2y agoI don't think I was clear, but I was only talking about the presenter's attempted explanation of the statistics of this problem.
- ComplexSystems 2y agoI am curious how this changes if we condition on it flipping in the air at least once. Can we think of this result as a mixture distribution of a fair 50/50 chance of it flips at least once, and a delta function that is 100% at the side it started on, if not flipped at all?
- vikingerik 2y agoSeems likely it would change. Here's another way to think about it: 0 rotations is more likely than 1 rotation, since there is a wider range of rotation speeds that lead to exactly 0 rotations than to exactly 1. Similarly, 2 flips is more likely than 3, 4 is more than 5, and so on. So you're always biased towards an even number of flips and the starting side. Take out the 0 case by your conditional, and you're left with 1 > 2, 3 > 4, 5 > 6, and so on, now biased towards an odd number and the non-starting side.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- joshuamorton 2y agoThe paper requires that the coins flipped at least once to be counted.
- swayvil 2y agoThis is clearly the law of conservation of reality at work. Likewise, when you hear a word for the first time suddenly you hear it five times in a row. Or if you see somebody once you suddenly start running into them all over the place. It's because it's cheaper to repeat past realities than to create new ones.
- Vecr 2y agoI don't think that's true, isn't this tested in a way to obviate that psychological effect? I've done coin-flipping in computer simulations and that doesn't happen. (And yes it was a bit more realistic vs a single element, multiple linked elements flip more realistically. No air resistance simulation though.)
- swayvil 2y agoOh sure, let's doubt the evidence of our senses in favor of convention. That's good science.
- Vecr 2y agoHow good are you at Bayesian statistics, conditionalization, and understanding various biases? The simulation here should be good (it's better than mine).
- swayvil 2y agoNext you'll cite Bible verse.
- Vecr 2y agoI don't think Bible verses are related. There are multiple ways to ground Bayesian statistics without resorting to grounding in coin flips. The simplest one isn't that robust, there's a mathematical one but it's abstract and uses calculus, there's a quantum one but I'm not even going there, and there's a highly robust one that's too complex for me to understand.
- archermarks 2y agoWinner of the 2024 Ig Nobel prize in probability [1]. A nice read as well! [1] https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2024 https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2024
- fedeb95 2y agoyou shouldn't bet on it though
- Vecr 2y agoProbably not. A reasonable Kelly calculation would make the attempt negative utility. Too much overhead. Also, depending on who's betting against who, deviating from the very particular protocol in the study would be highly incentivized.
- outsidein 2y agoFlip it twice. Once to determine which side is up at second throw. Reverse to counter bias at start of second throw. Then flip again for final result.
- two_handfuls 2y agoThat only works for a fixed bias, it's gameable if the person tossing the coin controls the bias.
- outsidein 2y agoThat is outside the preconditions of the paper: „if the person tossing the coin controls the bias“
- two_handfuls 2y agoLet me explain. You said: > Flip it twice. Once to determine which side is up at second throw. Reverse to counter bias at start of second throw. Then flip again for final result. Suppose I'm throwing the coin using your technique and I want to favor heads. I hold tails up for the first throw, making tails more likely. Then as per your rule, I put heads up for the second throw. Now, heads is more likely. Choose the opposite starting face to make tails more likely. So, your technique does no prevent the coin tosser from being able to favor their desired outcome.
- outsidein 2y agoThe paper is discussion regular people (not malicious people) tossing a coin, and under this precondition and assuming a fair (unbiased) coin. It is not about intentional favoring on result.
- Aloisius 2y agoThis won't fix the bias. It would be biased towards the obverse of the starting side up of the first flip.
- thih9 2y agoThis paper is also this year's Ig Nobel Prize winner: > Probability: A team of 50 researchers, for performing 350,757 experiments to show that when a coin is flipped, it is slightly more likely to land on the same side as it started. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners#2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners...
- damidekronik 2y agoFrom this year's Iq: Botany: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding that certain plants imitate the leaf shape of nearby plastic plants and concluding that "plant vision" is plausible. This somehow doesn't fit the Iq award in my mind.
- anigbrowl 2y agoThey 'need' to fill slots not that the IN awards have become an annual media event (presumably yielding some profit) so they've taken to mocking perfectly legitimate research as long as it is in some way scatalogical or counterintuitive. I lost interest in the Ig Nobel prize as a result; they've gone from an intermittent amusement to a celebration of ignorance. Incidentally the plant mimicry thing seems to be a defense against herbivorous mammals. It was previously theorized that the shape information was transmitted by symbiotic bacteria; the ability to imitate fake plants is a genuinely perplexing result imo.
- boomboomsubban 2y agoThe Ig Nobel has always been for serious science that sounds silly. Their website begins with >The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology. There goal has never been to mock the award winners.
- japoco 2y agoThis is probably just because the coins aren’t actually fair. If the coin is slightly biased towards heads, the first throw is more likely to heads, and so are all subsequent throws. Same for tails.
- Vecr 2y agoThat's not the problem. You can test that by using a highly secure random number generator, e.g. /dev/random in Linux, to select the initial side. Keep track of that initial side, record the side it lands on. This paper shows a same-side bias, not a heads bias.
- japoco 2y agoA same side bias is either a heads bias or a tails bias.
- Vecr 2y agoHow? I described how to randomize the initial side. Boolean true for heads, boolean false for tails, for example. Keep pulling those from the Kernel's secure RNG.
- alt227 2y agoIts not, its a bias towards which side the coin started on.
- japoco 2y agoWhich is either heads or tails.
- glxxyz 2y agoA coin with a heads bias is more likely to land on heads no matter how it's thrown. A coin with a same side bias is more likely to land on heads if it's thrown with heads facing up, and more likely to land on tails if thrown with with tails facing up.
- NameError 2y agoEasy way to get a fair result from an unfair coin toss: Flip the coin twice in a row, in this case starting with the same side facing up both times, so it's equally unfair for both tosses. If you get heads-heads or tails-tails, discard and start over until you get either heads-tails or tails-heads, which have equal probabilities (so you can say something like HT = "heads" and TH = "tails"). This works even if the coin lands heads 99% of the time, as long as it's consistent (but you'll probably have to flip a bunch of times in that case).
- mankyd 2y agoImportantly - you don't have to know the odds of the coin ahead of time, or which side is more likely. You only need to know that it is consistent.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoThe odds are important to know because if someone gave you a trick coin that always lands on heads, you will be flipping coins until the end of the universe. And I'm sure you have more important things to do than that.
- Vecr 2y agoNah, you can put in a rule to stop. It would be better to know ahead of time, but you don't need to.
- magicalhippo 2y ago> you will be flipping coins until the end of the universe Reminds me of one of my favorite movies, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which opens with just such a scenario[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjOqaD5tWB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjOqaD5tWB0
- legobmw99 2y agoI’ve seen this attributed to John von Neumann, of all people
- cgag 2y agoI wouldn't be surprised if there is something to it, but I suspected they didn't use legitimate coin flips (because it seems like a large amount of people can't really flip a coin), and looking at the videos confirms it, at least for the flips done by Bartos: https://osf.io/6a5hy/ https://osf.io/6a5hy/ They're very low RPM and very low time in the air. Nothing I would accept for any decision worth flipping a coin for.
- BiteCode_dev 2y agoThat's not tossing a coin, that's barely throwing it in the air. To me this kills the credibility of the entire study and of the authors. Sure, there may be something to it, but people will have a very different thing on their mind unless they check the video, which I wouldn't have done without your prompting. It's unlikely they don't understand how misleading it is. And somehow I have the intuition a proper coin toss will not exhibit the same properties.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoIs it unlikely? If I didn't read your comment I wouldn't see any problem there. I never saw anyone flipping a coin in a different way. It's just not done much around me.
- BiteCode_dev 2y agoIf you claim to do a research on coin tossing, the minimum is to be aware on how people toss coin. The whole purpose of tossing a coin is randomness, so of course you want high and fast. If the result was that no matter how high and fast you throw is you get this bias, it would have been interesting. But now you just say "if you do things badly, things don't work".
- ummonk 2y agoNo, the whole point of the paper (and the physics model it is verifying) is to see what happens in normal human coin tosses. If you want to measure what happens specifically with high and fast coin tosses, then that’s an entirely different study to be done.
- bgroat 2y agoThis has been commonly known by magicians for decades. I doubt that any single magician had conducted 350k flips, but I know I personally did ~2,500 to test the effect when I was a kid. And I'm sure if you got 30 magicians together to pool data we'd have a meta-analysis of about this size but with experiments a century ago
- bigbacaloa 2y ago[dead]
- morning-coffee 2y agoWell, I suppose if you need fodder to fill your CV, this is one way to do it.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoEspecially on LinkedIn! A single person would write 17000 posts about their "amazing journey" coin flip outcomes, and another 17001 "humbled by success" coin flip outcomes
- drcwpl 2y agoExactly :-)
- jgrant95 2y agoanyone else thinking about Pokemon TCGP...
- dev0p 2y agoMisty's flips are not fair, that's for sure
- d--b 2y agoAnd a toast covered in jam lands 100% of the time on the jam side.
- Uehreka 2y agoAnd cats always land on their feet. In combination, these facts can be exploited to achieve perpetual motion: https://youtu.be/Z8yW5cyXXRc https://youtu.be/Z8yW5cyXXRc
- helboi4 2y agoI think I figured this out when I was about 6 years old. It pretty much is always true.
- metalman 2y agostatistics be dammed,I'll flip you for it.....heads I win tails you loose
- KelvinFineBoy69 2y ago[dead]
- steeeeeve 2y agoI learned a trick with flipping coins from a barber at my grandpas shop when I was probably 6 or 7. Since then I've always been able to flip a coin and determine what the outcome is. It's really just being consistent with the flip and the catch.
- FartyMcFarter 2y agoIf this is done with a quick toss and the coin is flipping rapidly in the air, that's pretty impressive.
- burningChrome 2y agoThis is anecdotal evidence but Dennis Rodman (the pro basketball player) was the greatest rebounder of all time. One of his teammates related to how he would watch guys shoot (usually during warmups) and count the rotation of the ball. Based on how many times the ball would rotate, he knew if it was going in or not and then would position himself to get the rebound. I would imagine OP did something similar. Watch the coin as its rotating and then grabbing it and then flipping to the side he predicted.
- searealist 2y agoSandy Miller is widely considered to be the best volleyball player of all time. He would famously wear the same unwashed shorts every game for good luck. Maybe this was his trick.
- snowwrestler 2y agoI knew someone else who could do this pretty reliably. He said it was a “feel the timing” thing. Best analogy he had was maybe like landing an ice skating triple jump, or a complex dive. It happens too fast to be consciously controlled. Instead the trick is to train the body to get a feel for success and then just let the body do it.
- lupire 2y agoIt's easy. All you need to do is rotate (yaw) your hand when flipping so that the coin spins but never actually flips, or a little slower so it flips only once. A watchful eye can detect it happening, though. You can preview the effect by spinning a coin slowly on a table. This is a common problem in intro Physics Mechanics class.
- aquafox 2y agoFWIW, there is also a 2007 paper [1] that offers a physical explanation. [1] https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/diaconis_coinbias.pdf https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/diaconis_co...
- hackernewds 2y agoas long as a machine is used for consistency*
- seanhunter 2y agoThat is referenced in both the paper and the video in fact. Apparently Diaconis presented a model which predicted about 51% preference for "Same side" and also did 2500 flips and said that about 250k flips would be needed to get 3 sigma of significance. So this paper decided to test it empirically and got to about exactly that number after 350k flips from a team of researchers.
- whatever1 2y agoIn other news, probabilities again used to prove whatever conclusions we were planning to present anyway. It is time to stop the show, probabilities cannot prove specifics. Aka they cannot prove that the coin I hold is fair or not. We can only get trends for big populations. There is only one way to prove if a coin is fair. Measure the actual thing that matters. In this case mass distribution. And if the measurement is inaccurate, then count atoms. One by one.
- mirekrusin 2y agoAlso, there is fair _coin_ and fair coin _flip_, two different things.
- noman-land 2y agoHaven't read the paper yet but this is so weird because when I was a kid I noticed this phenomenon myself. I noticed I could reliably flip a coin such that when it landed it would land on the same side as it was flipped from. I was getting like 80% accuracy and I didn't even know what I was doing to achieve it. I could just usually feel when I flipped it that I "did it right". I used it a couple times to win coin toss decisions but then sorta forgot about it and relegated it to a statistical fluke. It would be amazing of there was some merit to it.
- cbsmith 2y agoThere's a "fair coin", and then there's a "fair flip". It's actually pretty difficult to do a truly "fair flip".
- lupire 2y agoA fair coin is just a coin. There is no such thing as an unfair coin, unless its third side is so huge that it can't be reasonably called a coin.
- cbsmith 2y agoYou're going to have a lot of fans amongst con men. ;-) Unfair coins very much do exist: https://izbicki.me/blog/how-to-create-an-unfair-coin-and-prove-it-with-math.html https://izbicki.me/blog/how-to-create-an-unfair-coin-and-pro...
- Frummy 2y agoMaybe you were like one with the coin and always pushed it the optimal way for like the same type of movement and direction and rotation for the same amount of rotations in air etc like perfected an initial condition and kept it stable like it rotated 6 times and landed the same way
- Tetraslam 2y agothe Force is with them
- yapyap 2y agowhat if they got evidence from 350.758 flips, would this impact anything
- acyou 2y agoThe paper looks like it has a large sample size, but it actually has a sample size of only 48 testers/flippers. Some of the videos of those testers show very low, low-rpm coin tosses, we're talking only 1-2 flips. Where they also flipped thousands of times, presumably in the same way. So there is actually a very small sample size in the study (N = 48), where testers that don't flip properly (low rpm, low height, few coin rotations) can affect the results disproportionately. Doesn't look like the study author backgrounds are particularly focused on statistics. I would presume with 48 authors (all but 3 of which flipped coins for the study), the role of some might have been more test subject than author. And isn't being the subject in your own study going to introduce some bias? Surely if you're trying to prove to yourself that the coins land on one side or another given some factor, you will learn the technique to do it, especially if you are doing a low-rpm, low flip. Based on the study results, some of the flippers appear to have learned this quite well. If the flippers (authors) had been convinced of the opposite (fair coins tend to land on the opposite side from which they started) and done the same study, I bet they could have collected data and written a paper with the results proving that outcome.
- salt4034 2y ago> testers that don't flip properly I think that's the point. It shows that people don't usually flip properly, leading to biased results.
- fluoridation 2y agoBut is that the case? The only way I've ever seen people flip a coin is by flicking it in the air with their thumb and either catching it or letting it hit a surface. I've never seen someone flip a coin like it was a die.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoThere is a [video presentation of the paper](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QjgvbvFoQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QjgvbvFoQA) which does a good job of explaining the inspiration for the study within the first few minutes. It sounds like what they were intending to study is the actual variance that is introduced, on average, by imperfections in throws conducted by humans. Unless that's mistaken, it's a fair point to consider the n=48 here. Did they discover an average that can be generalized to humans or just to those 48?
- vkaku 2y agoI guess our world has been run with unfair flips, LOL.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoYes… but the choice of which side they start is a random one!
- pkkkzip 2y agoI noticed phenomenon in poker as well. Someone who runs well ahead of the crowd continues to do so seemingly even playing randomly with no thought into traditional poker theory. For example, if a strong pair starts off with a bad beat then it tends to continue that trend. The word trend doesn't mean its going to happen but that its likely to continue the past. When someone continues exploiting this trend they have seemingly "broken" the game, it no longer functions like a calculated game of odds and when somebody plays like a maniac (like in the first scenario i mentioned) there is seemingly no other defense than to wait until the trend breaks but no matter how seasoned a player is they cannot shake the past and its perceived likelihood of continuing. This effect is rampant in stock market as well when there is seemingly less "random" reinforcements and belief in the crowd which without fail has given rise to black swans/massive collective drawdowns of the world war causing variety.
- matwood 2y agoWhen I was a kid we played quarters (dating myself) a lot. I felt this was the case, but nice to see it studied.
- hyponight 2y ago[dead]
- tarkin2 2y agoWhat I’ve learnt from this thread is that the problem with fair coin flips is not if they’re fair it’s whether we count them as a proper coin flips. And so who gets to decide? And if most people aren’t flipping like that then should we design a machine that flips the coins? And we try to control other factors as well? Or is a human—their imperfections included—flipping the coins inherently important to the idea of coin flipping, statistics and randomness?
- amoss 2y agoMy heart goes out the cryptographers. All that code, written over decades, that assumes coin flips are 50:50. So much updating and rewriting to do. Quite a few algorithms that will need a rethink to remain fair.
- TheRealPomax 2y agoIf your cryptographer's code is based on coin flips, you probably want to find a new cryptographer.
- calibas 2y agoI think I can explain it: Other side: 1/2 flip, 1 1/2 flips, 2 1/2 flips... Same side: 1 flip, 2 flips, 3 flips... It seems like there's equal chances, but my theory is that the 1/2 flip is the least likely thing to occur. When you take that into account, there's a slightly increased chance that it's going to land on the same side.
- sans_souse 2y agothought experiment: if we design a mechanical arm to enable coin flipping utilizing advanced tech to establish fine-grained adjustments and calibrations to effectively reproduce results with any given coin to and work out formulas to arrive at these results; are we currently or will we ever be able to say with absolute certainty what any given coin toss's result will be?
- fbartos 2y agoHi, I'm the first author of the manuscript, so I thought I could answer some of the questions and clarify some issues (all details are in the manuscript, but who has the time to read it ;) Low RPM tosses: Most of the recordings are on crapy webcams with ~ 30FPS. The coin spin usually much faster than the sensor can record which results in often non-spinning-looking flips. Why did we take the videos in the first place? To check that everyone collected the data and to audit the results. Building a flipping matching: The study is concerned with human coin flips. Diaconis, Holmes, and Montgomery's (DHM, 2007) paper theorize that the imperfection of human flips causes the same-side bias. Building a machine completely defeats the purpose of the experiment. Many authors and wasted public funding: We did the experiment in our free time and we had no funding for the study = no money was wasted. Also, I don't understand why are so many people angry that students who contributed their free time and spent the whole day flipping coins with us were rewarded with co-authorship. The experiment would be impossible to do without them. Improper tosses: Not everyone flips coin perfectly and some people are much worse at flipping than others. We instructed everyone to flip the coin as if they were to settle a bet and that the coin has to flip at least once (at least one flip would create bias for the opposite side). We find that for most people, the bias decreased over time which suggests that people might get better at flipping by practice = decrease the bias and it also discredits the theory that they learned how to be biased on purpose. From my own experience - I flipped coins more than 20,000 times and I have no clue how to bias it. Also, we did a couple of sensitivity analyses excluding outliers - the effect decreased a bit but we still found plentiful evidence for DHM. If you doubt my stats background, you are more than welcome to re-analyze the data on your own. They are available on OSF: https://osf.io/mhvp7/ https://osf.io/mhvp7/ (including cleaning scripts etc). Frantisek Bartos
- ineptech 2y agoHi, thanks for replying. I have no complaints about your analysis, and agree that your results strongly support the D-H-M model (that there is a slight bias in coin-flipping over all and that it is caused by precession). However, it looks like about a third of your volunteers had little or no bias, presumably due to flipping end-over-end with no precession, and about a third had a lot of precession and a lot of bias. Your paper draws the conclusion that coin-flipping inherently has a small-but-significant bias, but looking at table 2 it seems like an equally valid conclusion would be that some people flip a coin with no bias and others don't. Did you investigate this at all? In particular, I'd expect that if you took the biggest outliers, explained what precession is and asked them to intentionally minimize it, that the bias would shrink or disappear.
- mihaic 2y agoHere's a little through experiment I use to come to this conclusion: Let's say you start a counter from the number 0, and keep on incrementing it. The moment you stop it to look at the counter, is it going to be odd or even? At any given moment in time, either the number of observed odd numbers is the same as the number of even numbers, or the number of even numbers is larger by 1 (such as going from 0 to 1 to 2). So in the end there's always a slightly larger chance at stopping on an even number. I know it's more complicated, I use it just as an intuitive explanation.
- Animats 2y agoUseful. This demonstrates that coin flipping merely amplifies noise in human manipulation. A classic example in the old PSSC high school physics curriculum was a little catapult-like device which tossed a coin, spinning it a few times in mid-air, and repeatably landing it on the same side. It's a demonstration that Newtonian physics is repeatable.
- mrbungie 2y agoYes, that's because a coin toss is not intrinsically random, but just pseudo-random due to its chaotic behaviour which is especially notable at relatively "extreme" starting conditions. But if the tosser were to control, manipulate or just don't care enough about adding entropy to the toss, those random generation qualities of the object would start to fall apart. PS: As I read before, dice/coins are not entropy generators but rather, entropy sinks+processors.
- lupire 2y agoWhat in the Universe is an entropy generator?
- sorenKaram 2y agonot enough flips
- stevage 2y agoNot totally relevant, but I once discovered it's pretty easy to cheat a coin toss, at least with an Australian 20c coin. Flip the coin, catch in your hand, and in the process of transferring it to the back of your other hand, feel which way up it is, and optionally flip it. With our coins, the head (the Queen's face at the time) is pretty distinct with a large smooth area, compared to the rough feel of the platypus and water. So if ever you're flipping for anything that matters, make sure the coin lands directly on the ground.
- harry8 2y agoPr(same side)=0.508, 95% credible interval (CI) [0.506,0.509] Toss it 100 times, overstating the effect you'd expect it to land on the same side it started 51 times, opposite side 49. This seems to have been lost in much of the discussion. Employing this in professional NBA basketball you /might/ get one extra toss win per season out of your 100 games compared to any other way of selecting without taking into account the starting side. Good luck using this!
- quantadev 2y agoI'm not sure I believe this coin flip bias, but I would if lots of other researchers can reproduce it. If indeed it's happening, the only explanation can be something to do with very deep Quantum Mechanics including multiverse theory, where we're simply "more likely" to be in a universe where the coin ends where it starts. (But honestly it seems like it would take trillions of flips to detect, just as a hunch) So that would make this experiment, believe it or not, akin to the infamous Slit-Experiment in Particle Physics, where multiverses are one way that's theorized as an explanation. That is, we're sort of in "all universes" as s superposition until something interacts in a way forcing us into ONE universe. (i.e. wave collapse) Along the same multiverse theme, I also have this other wild conjecture (feel free to ridicule it!) which is that AI LLM (Large Language Models) are "tending towards intelligence" during training because at each quantum collapse (of which Model Training has astronomically high numbers, with powerful computer data centers running for months) we're nudged just slightly more probabilistically into a universe where LLMs are "smart" as compared to "dumb", and so when you multiply it all up over months of churning, that puts us into a universe with dramatically smarter AI, because of the sheer number of computations, adding all the probabilities. I realize the training of AI is "deterministic" but nonetheless only quantum probabilities "determine" which universe we collapse into at each QM decoherence. So you can ask WHY is there this 'nudge' towards universes with smart LLMs? Probably because in all future universes we only exist because LLMs save us, or help us in some way, so other timelines/universes are "less" likely.
- left-struck 2y ago>If indeed it's happening, the only explanation can be something to do with very deep Quantum Mechanics including multiverse theory Why would that be the only explanation? that seems like very low down on a long list of possible explanations. I didn’t read the paper but the author was discussing how some people impart precession onto the coin which is a likely explanation for causing a bias.
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoAny relatively new field of physics gets the same treatment as religion.
- upmind 2y agoCurious if this is true for dice, whenever me and my family play monopoly, my dad likes to look at the dice (as he's shaking it) and he usually gets a high number if he can see a low one and vice versa.