Question

Heads or Tails

A few things for this discussion board: 1. You do not need to post first for this board. 2. You do NOT need to respond to other posts. 3. You DO need to answer all the questions below to get full credit.

1. Obtain a quarter coin. Flip the coin 10 times. Record your results.

2. Summarize YOUR results in terms of heads and tails.

3. Calculate the probability of heads and tails from your results.

4. Combine your results to the previous results posted. (I want a running total of all results.)

5. Calculate the probability of heads and tails from the discussion total thus far. (If you are the first post, you will not have other results to combine with - that's okay).

6. Discuss what the difference (if any) between your results and the class combined results.

7. What do you expect the probability to be as more and more students post?

Here is an example (do no include this in your total).

Shannon flips a quarter 10 times, I get the following results:

1. T H H T T T T H T T

2. 7 Tails 3 Heads

3. P(Tails) = 0.70   P(Heads) = 0.30  

4. Combine my results (Let's assume so far there are 33 Heads and 27 Tails) Now we would have 36 Heads and 34 Tails

5. P(Heads) = 36/70 = 0.514 P(Tails) = 34/70 = 0.486.

6. My results were slightly different than the class summary. I had a higher probability of tails and a lower probability of heads.

7. You will need to do this in your own words.

Answer 1

Ans 1 I flips the coin 10 times and I get the following results

H H T H T T H T T H

Ans 2 So I get 5 Heads and 5 tails

3 Therefore P(Head) = No of Heads/Total number of times coin is tossed = 5/10 = 0.5

Similarly P(Tails) = 0.5

4 Assuming that the results given in the question is my previous result initially no.of heads is 36 so now it 41 and no.of tails is 34 so now it 39.

5 P(Head) = Total No of Heads/Total number of times coin has been tossed till now = 41/80 = 0.5125

P(Tails) = 39/80 = 0.4875

6 My results were little different from the results till now. The probability of Heads in my observation is a little less than that of the total result calculated in 5 and the probability of Tails in my observation is a little more.

7 Theoritically we know that P(Heads) = P(Tails) =0.5 so as we continuously increase the number of observation that is as more students post we would observe that the P(Heads) and P(Tails) will tend to its theoritical value that is 0.5 .