Double-headed coin after ten straight heads
Question
A bag holds coins: are ordinary fair coins and one has a head on each side. You pull out a coin uniformly at random and toss it times, and every toss comes up heads. Given this, what is the probability that the coin in your hand is the double-headed one?
Short answer
. By Bayes' rule, the double-headed coin produces ten heads with certainty while a fair coin does so with chance . The posterior is .
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
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