Heads needed to trust the two-headed coin
Question
A bag holds 20 coins: 19 are fair and one has heads on both sides. You draw one coin at random and toss it repeatedly. What is the smallest number such that, after seeing heads in a row, your posterior probability that you hold the two-headed coin is at least ?
Short answer
9. By Bayes, after straight heads the posterior is . Requiring this to be at least means , and the smallest such is 9.
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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
- Continuous Random Variables and Probability Density Functions
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