This is just a minor point, but you could flip a coin (many times, of course) to determine if it was exactly balanced, and people have done just this, and it turns out most coins are not balanced. And (hopefully) Nevada Gaming Regulators do the equivalent when they test machines for randomness. Or do they just outsource the job to China?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/56411/how-to-test-randomness-case-in-point-shuffling
The wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_flipping
says most people coin flip with biases in the range of ".495 or .503".
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "Frank" <frank@...> wrote:
> It would be like flipping two coins and trying to infer from the results which one had more heads on it. Look at the coins, make sure they have both heads and a tails for sides, but for goodness sake don't flip them and record the results to learn anything more.
