Coin Flip Streaks - from automatetheboringstuff.com cha4
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For this exercise, we’ll try doing an experiment. If you flip a coin 100 times and write down an “H” for each heads and “T” for each tails, you’ll create a list that looks like “T T T T H H H H T T.” If you ask a human to make up 100 random coin flips, you’ll probably end up with alternating head-tail results like “H T H T H H T H T T,” which looks random (to humans), but isn’t mathematically random. A human will almost never write down a streak of six heads or six tails in a row, even though it is highly likely to happen in truly random coin flips. Humans are predictably bad at being random.
Write a program to find out how often a streak of six heads or a streak of six tails comes up in a randomly generated list of heads and tails. Your program breaks up the experiment into two parts: the first part generates a list of randomly selected 'heads' and 'tails' values, and the second part checks if there is a streak in it. Put all of this code in a loop that repeats the experiment 10,000 times so we can find out what percentage of the coin flips contains a streak of six heads or tails in a row. As a hint, the function call random.randint(0, 1) will return a 0 value 50% of the time and a 1 value the other 50% of the time.
You can start with the following template:
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import random
numberOfStreaks = 0
for experimentNumber in range(10000):
# Code that creates a list of 100 'heads' or 'tails' values.
# Code that checks if there is a streak of 6 heads or tails in a row.
print('Chance of streak: %s%%' % (numberOfStreaks / 100))
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Of course, this is only an estimate, but 10,000 is a decent sample size. Some knowledge of mathematics could give you the exact answer and save you the trouble of writing a program, but programmers are notoriously bad at math.
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