ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Checking if a coin is fair

Imagine you have a coin and you want to check if it's fair or not. That means you want to find out if it's going to land on heads or tails equally often.

The first thing you can do is to flip the coin a bunch of times, like 100 times or more. Every time it lands, you can write down whether it's heads or tails. After you've flipped it a lot of times, you can count how many times it landed on heads and how many times it landed on tails.

If it landed on heads about 50 times and tails about 50 times, then it's probably a fair coin! But if it landed on heads 80 times and tails only 20 times, or the other way around, then it might not be a fair coin.

You can also use math to check if a coin is fair. The equation for a fair coin is that the probability of landing on heads is 0.5 (which means there's a 50% chance of heads and 50% chance of tails). This means that if you flip the coin a lot of times, the number of heads and tails should be almost the same.

But if the coin is unfair, then the probability of landing on heads might be different than 0.5. For example, if the probability of landing on heads is 0.6, then you would expect to see more heads than tails if you flip the coin a lot of times.

To check if a coin is fair using math, you can use a formula called the binomial distribution. This formula tells you the probability of getting a certain number of heads (or tails) out of a certain number of flips. You can compare the results you get from the formula with the actual number of heads and tails you got from flipping the coin, and see if they match up.

So that's how you can check if a coin is fair, by flipping it a bunch of times or by using math to calculate the probabilities.