"Flip The Coin", the online game

A Fair fair coin toss

The game of uncertainty: Tossing a coin gives us roughly 50% chance of it landing heads and 50% chance landing tails, but until the coin lands we don't know what it will be!

Interestingly, real-world human-made coin flips aren't always perfectly fair. Studies have shown that a coin has about a 51% chance of landing on the same face it started on. Factors like air resistance, the coin's weight distribution, and even the mechanical motion of flipping can affect the outcome. For instance, a (PDF) 2007 study by mathematicians Persi Diaconis, Susan Holmes, and Richard Montgomery (DHM) found the chances on landing the same face was 51% for natural coin tosses.

Theorically, a coin is fair and the outcome is random. But in practice, it's not.

Each coin toss is an independent "event" and the outcome of the previous toss does not affect the probability of the next toss. But, as we described, the real-world coin toss is not as fair as we'd like.

In flipthecoin.app, we try to make the coin toss as fair as possible by introducing a component of randomness so it's non-deterministic. Our coin toss cannot be tricked as easily.