Fair 50-50 outcome from a coin of unknown bias
Question
A coin comes up heads with some unknown probability strictly between and . Using only this coin, how can you produce an outcome that is exactly 50-50?
Short answer
Toss twice: HT means one outcome, TH the other, and on HH or TT start again. Both HT and TH have probability , so they are equally likely (von Neumann's trick). Each round succeeds with probability , so the expected number of tosses is .
Adapted from Zhou, A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews, sec. 4.3 Conditional Probability and Bayes' Formula, 'Fair probability from an unfair coin', p.74; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
- Maximum Likelihood Estimation: Score and Log-Likelihood
- Bias, Variance, and Mean Squared Error
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