Next toss after a streak from an ordinary coin
Question
Someone takes an ordinary-looking coin out of their pocket and tosses it three times, getting heads each time. What would you estimate as the probability that the next toss is a head? How would your estimate change if it had come up heads times in a row?
Short answer
About after three heads; close to after a hundred. Three heads happens one time in eight with a fair coin, which barely shifts a strong prior that pocket coins are fair. A hundred heads has probability under fairness, so even a tiny prior weight on a trick or heavily biased coin dominates the posterior and the next toss is almost surely heads.
Adapted from Joshi, Denson & Downes, Quant Job Interview Questions and Answers, Q3.11, p.81; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Worked Examples — Probability Trees, Monty Hall, and Bayesian Updating
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
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