ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Checking whether a coin is fair

Imagine you have a coin and you want to make sure it's fair. This means that when you flip it, there's an equal chance of it landing on heads or tails.

To check this, you need to flip the coin many times and record the results. Let's say you flip it 100 times and count how many times it lands on heads and how many times it lands on tails.

If it's a fair coin, you should get a result that's close to 50-50. This means that out of 100 flips, you might get 48 heads and 52 tails or 50 heads and 50 tails. If you get a result that's too far from 50-50, then the coin might not be fair.

To make sure that your result isn't just luck, you can repeat the experiment many times (maybe 10 or 20) and see if you get consistent results. If you keep getting results that are far from 50-50, then you might consider the coin to be unfair.

One important thing to remember is that even with a fair coin, you might not always get exactly 50-50 results. That's just the average you would expect over a very large number of flips. So if you flip a coin 10 times and get 7 heads and 3 tails, that doesn't mean the coin is definitely unfair. But if you keep getting results like that over and over again, then it might be time to question the fairness of the coin.