How is it that when you flip a coin 10 times, the likely hood that it’ll land on heads 10 times in a row is extremely small but the likely hood that it’ll land on heads is 50/50 if it already landed on heads 9 times? I get that it’s a closed system and its roughly 50/50 for every coin flip but my brain is just telling me that it should be a higher chance that it would land on tails instead of heads. How does this work?
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I heard a story from a public speaker about an event that he went to. There were exactly 1024 people at the event. One of the organizers asked another if he wanted to bet him that he could find one person to correctly predict a coin toss 10 times in a row. The other person did not believe this was possible and took the bet.
The organizer smiled and told everyone of the attendees to pair up. Then each one of them had to choose heads or tails. The one who chose correctly would move on, the other would not. With the number of people there it was exactly 10 rounds. One person had called it correctly 10 times.
Now, I’m not sure if this is real but it illustrates the point. Calling heads or tails 10 times in a row seems hard but if you take that context away it’s just a single guess repeated 10 times. Another way to think about it is what if they were spread out? Instead of “10 times in a row” you just do it once a day and record the result. Does it seem that hard? I think proximity of the choices has a lot to do with it as well.
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