Coin Flip Run Lengths

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Problem Description

This program explores the phenomena of "runs" when flipping a coins.  A run is a string of consecutive flips with identical results.  Long runs seem to occur more often than we think they should.

Background & Techniques

Natalie Angier in her book "The Canon" has a chapter about probabilities which describes an experiment conducted by a math professor with new classes. Each student flips a coin 100 times and records the results with the instructor out of the room.  The hook is that half of the class actually flips a coin, the other half "flips" mentally, i.e. just records what they imagine the results of the next flip might be. The instructor returns to the room and sorts the results according to whether they represent real or imagined tosses.

The trick works because most minds do not appreciate the occurrence of "runs", sequences of tosses with the same result. Almost every set of 100 tosses will have have one or more sets of 5 or more Heads or Tails in a row. (The expected number of such strings is slightly more than 3.0.) Very few of the human-imagined results will have even one such string.  This program verifies the result by mathematically flipping coins and comparing experimental with expected results for a range of "same result" string lengths.

Two buttons represent alternative experimental techniques.  Button1 simulates the experiment described above, throw 100 coins per trial for the number of trials specified and record number of runs of length N.

The 2nd button reports runs of length N per 100 trials if only N are thrown at a time. Until you think about it, it's surprising that the second method produces results 4 times larger than Method 1. This is because when throwing N coins per trial and counting runs of length N, the preceding and following coins do not matter. If we throw 100 coins looking for runs of length N, the coins preceding and following a "success" must show the

 opposite side. So runs of length 3 Heads require a "run" of length 5 with value THHHT which have a probability of 1/32 compared to 1/8 for runs of length 3 when only 3 coins are thrown.

Non-programmers are welcome to read on, but may want to skip to the bottom of this page to download executable version of the program.

Notes for Programmers

Nothing too hard except figuring out why flipping a coin 100 times and counting runs of length N has only 1/4 the occurrences of runs of length N  compared to N coins thrown 100 times and length N runs counted.     Procedure "Trial" simulates results if NbrCoins are thrown consecutively and counts the number of runs for each length from 1 to Runlength.  Counts of number of Heads runs and Tails runs are returned in separate arrays.     

To simulate the original experiment, Trial(100, 10, HCount, TCount) is called Nbrtrials times, each call representing one trial.  Nbrtrials is set from the value of the Radio Group box, Radiogroup1..  The totals from each trial for all 10 run lengths  are totaled in arrays  HeadRuns and TailRuns.   These totals, divided bynbrtrial are reported as observed values.

For the 2nd button, simulating runs of length N observed when only N coins are flipped in each trial, an outer loop for each run length 1 through 10 contains an inner loop calling Tria( i, i, HCount, TCount) Nbrtrials times and summing  only Hcount[ i ] and TCount[ i ] for i= 1 to 10.      

Running/Exploring the Program 

bullet Download source
bullet Download  executable

Suggestions for Further Explorations

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Original Date: January 13, 2009

Modified: May 11, 2018

 

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