Question

When I switch out isWinDefault with isWinConfidence I get drastically different results. I felt they should be the same. Is there a bug in my code or a property of statistics that I’ve misunderstood?

This test is meant to simulate flipping a single coin 1x vs a coin many times.

The question is

If P(x) is 70% then should p(x) * 100 be >= 70 70% of the time, no?

Thanks.

    private void TestWin()
    {
        double headsUp = 0;
        double testRuns = 100;
        for (double i = 0; i < testRuns; i++)
        {
            if (IsWinConfidence())
            {
                headsUp++;
            }

        }
        label1.Text = "Probability of Heads is " + headsUp /testRuns;

    }

    private bool IsWinDefault()
    {
        if (r.NextDouble() <= .7)
        {
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }

    private bool IsWinConfidence()
    {
        int headsCount = 0;
        for (double x = 0; x < 100; x++)
        {
            if (IsWinDefault())
                headsCount++;

        }

        double pHeadsCount = headsCount / 100d;
        if (pHeadsCount >= .7 )
        {
            return true;
        }
        else
        {
            return false;
        }


    }

Answer 1

Here’s the simple answer:

A 70% probability means that on average, 100 coin flips will produce 70 heads up. It will, however, sometimes be more than 70, and sometimes less.

In other words, the number of heads up you will get for each batch of 100 coin flips, will be close to 70. Sometimes below 70, sometimes above 70, sometimes exactly 70.

So if the number swings around 70, it only stands to reason that if you’re asking “how often will it swing above 70, or equal to 70”, you will get an answer that says “around 50% of the time”.

So you’re not asking the right question with your code there.

In fact, increasing the number in your loop in IsWinConfidence to something much higher gives you a number close to 50.

---

Let’s pick apart your arguments here.

You’re saying that if you have:

A biased coin, that 70% of the time, will land with heads up, and 30% of the time, with heads down

Then you’re saying that:

If I flip the coin 100 times, I should get more than 70 heads up

One does not lead to the other, there’s a flaw in your arguments here. Probability is not about guarantees, it’s about averages.

If probability was absolute, your second statement should be:

If I flip the coin 100 times, I should get 70 heads up

Notice the lack of “more than” here.

Instead, what the first argument means is this:

If I flip the coin 100 times, then flip it 100 more times, then 100 more times, then 100 more times, and so on, then on average each 100 flips will have 70 heads up

Now, I don’t know enough about probability calculations to pick apart your loops and counts, but I do know that just following logic, your arguments fail.

Let’s try another approach.

If the coin is even, though biased, it means out of a 100 coin flips, you will sometimes get more than 70, and sometimes less than 70.

In my naive mind, this means that… On average, you will only get more than 70 coin flips half the time.

By increasing the numbers in your loop to 100.000, I get the confidence-function to return close to 50. This seems to back up my theory.

But as I said, the chance of me being an expert (or even dabbler) in probability is less than zero.