Related papers: Simulating a die roll by flipping two coins

The problem of creating a three-sided dice with the probability of it landing on each of its sides being equal to 1/3 has been around for many years. Various approaches have been attempted, but as different authors achieved at different…

Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. We collected $350{,}757$ coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing…

This paper looks into the gain or loss from rolling a fair die multiple times and choosing the highest or lowest number as the outcome over rolling the die just once. Specifically, this paper gives a general formula for the expected value…

In 1976, Knuth and Yao presented an algorithm for sampling from a finite distribution using flips of a fair coin that on average used the optimal number of flips. Here we show how to easily run their algorithm for the special case of…

Given a sequence of numbers $\{p_n\}$ in $[0,1]$, consider the following experiment. First, we flip a fair coin and then, at step $n$, we turn the coin over to the other side with probability $p_n$, $n\ge 2$. What can we say about the…

A closed form is found for the expected number of rolls of a fair n-sided die until three consecutive increasing values are seen. The answer is rational, and the greatest common divisor of the numerator and denominator is given in terms of…

Two players alternate tossing a biased coin where the probability of getting heads is p. The current player is awarded alpha points for tails and alpha+beta for heads. The first player reaching n points wins. For a completely unfair coin…

Consider a coin tossing experiment which consists of tossing one of two coins at a time, according to a renewal process. The first coin is fair and the second has probability $1/2 + \theta$, $\theta \in [-1/2,1/2]$, $\theta$ unknown but…

Given a (possibly infinite) subset $A$ of the natural numbers, we ask how many times a fair six-sided die must be rolled until the rolled numbers add up to an element of $A$. Using a one-dimensional dynamic programming recursion together…

In this paper we analyze the probability distributions associated with rolling (possibly unfair) dice infinitely often. Specifically, given a $q$-sided die, if $x_i\in\{0,\ldots,q-1\}$ denotes the outcome of the $i^{\text{th}}$ toss, then…

Faced with a sequence of N binary events, such as coin flips (or Ising spins), it is natural to ask whether these events reflect some underlying dynamic signals or are just random. Plausible models for the dynamics of hidden biases lead to…

We generalize the problem of coin flipping to more than two outcomes and parties. We term this problem dice rolling, and study both its weak and strong variants. We prove by construction that in quantum settings (i) weak N-sided dice…

While it is well known that a Turing machine equipped with the ability to flip a fair coin cannot compute more that a standard Turing machine, we show that this is not true for a biased coin. Indeed, any oracle set $X$ may be coded as a…

Have you ever taken a disputed decision by tossing a coin and checking its landing side? This ancestral "heads or tails" practice is still widely used when facing undecided alternatives since it relies on the intuitive fairness of…

A method for the numerical simulation of signed probability distributions for the case of tossing $1/n$-th of a coin is presented and illustrated by examples.

Let S\subset (0,1). Given a known function f:S\to (0,1), we consider the problem of using independent tosses of a coin with probability of heads p (where p\in S is unknown) to simulate a coin with probability of heads f(p). We prove that if…

A coin is just a two sided dice. Recently, Mochon proved that quantum weak coin flipping with an arbitrarily small bias is possible. However, the use of quantum resources to allow N remote distrustful parties to roll an N-sided dice has yet…

How many fair coin tosses to choose 1 of $n$ options with uniform probability? Although a probability problem, the solution is essentially number-theoretic, with special roles for Mersenne numbers, Fermat numbers, and the haupt exponent. We…

Here, we present a variant of the sliding coins game. Two coins are placed on distinct squares of a semi-infinite linear board with squares numbered $0, 1, 2, dots, $. Two players take turns and move a coin to a lower unoccupied square.…

Let $q \in (0,1)$ and $\delta \in (0,1)$ be real numbers, and let $C$ be a coin that comes up heads with an unknown probability $p$, such that $p \neq q$. We present an algorithm that, on input $C$, $q$, and $\delta$, decides, with…