Gene, The people at Fourmilab's "HotBits" site, which publishes random bit based on radioactive decay, have given quite a bit of thought to the problem of transforming a possibly-nonuniform random variable into a uniform one. See https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html for details. Dan, I'm pretty sure I still don't understand your question. Can you flesh out the situation more completely, with a little more storytelling to elucidate the demonstrator's motivation and the skeptical audience's problem? On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 6:38 PM, Eugene Salamin via math-fun < math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> wrote:
I'll pose a slightly different question -- how would a group of physicists assure a 50/50 outcome? One might use a light source and two detectors, one generating 0's the other 1's. But there will be some slight difference in detector sensitivity. You will have to set a spec, like 51/49 or better, and then tweak the experiment.
-- Gene
On Wednesday, May 31, 2017, 2:30:10 PM PDT, Dan Asimov <asimov@msri.org> wrote:You have to perform a random binary experiment in front of a crowd of people —
so no fooling is allowed — in such a way that everyone is convinced that
the experiment was fair. The people include some technical experts but many
who are not.
What is the simplest / easiest / cheapest way to ensure that the crowd will
be convinced that the experiment was fair (the two outcomes had an equal
chance of occurring) ???
—Dan
P.S. I do not have an answer to this, but maybe there is a "best" answer. _______________________________________________
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