English

Turning a coin over instead of tossing it

Probability 2016-06-13 v1

Abstract

Given a sequence of numbers {pn}\{p_n\} in [0,1][0,1], consider the following experiment. First, we flip a fair coin and then, at step nn, we turn the coin over to the other side with probability pnp_n, n2n\ge 2. What can we say about the distribution of the empirical frequency of heads as nn\to\infty? We show that a number of phase transitions take place as the turning gets slower (i.e. pnp_n is getting smaller), leading first to the breakdown of the Central Limit Theorem and then to that of the Law of Large Numbers. It turns out that the critical regime is pn=const/np_n=\text{const}/n. Among the scaling limits, we obtain Uniform, Gaussian, Semicircle and Arcsine laws.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.03281,
  title  = {Turning a coin over instead of tossing it},
  author = {Janos Englander and Stanislav Volkov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.03281},
  year   = {2016}
}