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Heads or Tails Revisited
Purpose: It was show in last years experiment, Heads or Tails who Wins? that the coin toss ends up relatively as a 50% either way. The premise of that experiment being that the pennies used are relatively perfect pennies. In this bi-week experiment, the goal is to test the probability of heads or tails in a loaded penny.
Hypothesis: Because the penny is being altered, it becomes the hypothesis of this experiment that by changing one side of the penny, the nuetral odds now would be shifted towards either heads or tails.
Equipment: Needed for this experiment is one penny, tape, and pen and paper, calculator optional.
Procedure: In this experiment the penny was loaded by placing two strips of tape on the heads side of the penny to add more weight. The penny was tossed 500 times.
Results:
 
Side
Number of Times came up
Percentage came up
Heads (taped side)
254/500
50.8%
Tails   (untaped side)
246/500
49.2%
Conclusion: Based on the results, the penny kept the 50/50 chance alive. It is noted that this does not prove that a penny toss cannot be rigged, however, this does shed some light on the effectiveness of rigging it by weight. More experimentation must be done as to whether adding more weight or weighting just the top half of one side may affect the outcomes. An explanation to this may be because the penny's outcome seems solely dependant on what point the spinning penny hits the ground. As long as the added weight does not cause the penny to stop spinning it should continue to be a random event.

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