Comment by travisjungroth
4 years ago
If you had a camera pointing at a thousand coins that flipped once every second since the beginning of the universe, you still would probably not see 60 heads in a row.
4 years ago
If you had a camera pointing at a thousand coins that flipped once every second since the beginning of the universe, you still would probably not see 60 heads in a row.
If you had flipped one coin 4.35e17 times and never saw 60 heads in a row, on a biased coin, I'd be rather surprised. (took 13.8 billion years as the age of the universe). Do that 1000 more times and still don't see 60 heads in a row it would be even more surprising.
It doesn't change the point of my original comment, regardless of the improbability of 60 heads in a row, you aren't "due" 40 tails in a row because the events are independent. That's all I was getting at before you took us on a weird tangent.
I did some miscalculations. 2^60 is 1.15E18. So you couldn't do a thousand times per second. But it probably wouldn't happen at 1 per second.
The original point of your comment is correct, at least from a probability standpoint. You don't get "owed" tails. I guess my hint was that there are sometimes other factors at play that mean the theory goes out the window. Like if someone shuffles a deck in front of you and it ends up new deck order, it's more likely they're a magician than lucky.