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Coin flipping, coin tossing, or heads or tails is the practice of throwing a coin in the air and checking which side is showing when it lands, in order to randomly choose between two alternatives. It is a form of sortition which inherently has two possible outcomes.
A test is performed by tossing the coin N times and noting the observed numbers of heads, h, and tails, t. The symbols H and T represent more generalised variables expressing the numbers of heads and tails respectively that might have been observed in the experiment. Thus N = H + T = h + t.
A simple example is the tossing of a fair (unbiased) coin. Since the coin is fair, the two outcomes ("heads" and "tails") are both equally probable; the probability of "heads" equals the probability of "tails"; and since no other outcomes are possible, the probability of either "heads" or "tails" is 1/2 (which could also be written as 0.5 or 50%).
If one penny is heads and the other tails, Odd wins and keeps both coins. Matching pennies is a non-cooperative game studied in game theory. It is played between two players, Even and Odd. Each player has a penny and must secretly turn the penny to heads or tails. The players then reveal their choices simultaneously.
The outer coin makes two rotations rolling once around the inner coin. The path of a single point on the edge of the moving coin is a cardioid.. The coin rotation paradox is the counter-intuitive math problem that, when one coin is rolled around the rim of another coin of equal size, the moving coin completes not one but two full rotations after going all the way around the stationary coin ...
The entropy of the unknown result of the next toss of the coin is maximized if the coin is fair (that is, if heads and tails both have equal probability 1/2). This is the situation of maximum uncertainty as it is most difficult to predict the outcome of the next toss; the result of each toss of the coin delivers one full bit of information.
As an example of a statistical test, an experiment is performed to determine whether a coin flip is fair (equal chance of landing heads or tails) or unfairly biased (one outcome being more likely than the other). Suppose that the experimental results show the coin turning up heads 14 times out of 20 total flips.
A fair coin, when tossed, should have an equal chance of landing either side up. In probability theory and statistics, a sequence of independent Bernoulli trials with probability 1/2 of success on each trial is metaphorically called a fair coin. One for which the probability is not 1/2 is called a biased or unfair coin.