Using any "standard" coin the chance of the coin inherently being 100% fair is probably zero anyway due to the simple fact of the two-sides being different..... The only way to get a really fair coin, and the only way to accurately test for a coin being fair is to ensure/check the physical characteristics of the coin - not by infinite tossing ;) On 6 Mar 2016, at 19:18, Warren D Smith wrote:
It is correct that, if handed a truly-fair coin, then any tester of fairness would need to keep tossing it forever and would never be able to announce it is fair.
Of course, any such test is necessarily at best one-sided, meaning it can detect unfair coins (and it should do so with probability=1) but it can never detect fair coins. It can and will make 1-sided errors, i.e sometimes branding truly-fair coins as unfair. But by design of the test we can make that 1-sided error probability be <=K for user-specified K>0.
Re somebody criticizing me criticizing Salamin's coin test -- well, my criticism had asked him whether his intended scheme was really the one I refuted. He has not responded to my question, so far.
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