Basic HTML version of Foils prepared Mar 20 1999

Foil 6 Tossing Coins is a Better Idea

From Java Academy:Polls and Throwing Dice NPAC Java Academy February--April 99 -- Mar 20 1999. by Geoffrey Fox


1 So a better model is tossing coins a 1000 times.
2 Shift over coin toss by 200 so results lie in range 201..1200 as in the Dice accumulation.
3 Now the frequency distribution is narrower.
4 It is still a beautiful bell shaped Gaussian but the percentage error is 1.6% not 2.4%.
5 You will get better answers from asking 1 person from 1000 households rather than 5 people from each of 200 households.
6 Actually Dice are not a very good representation of polling, as a result with 1000 cells corresponds to only 200 Dice
7 This is like polling where you went to 200 households and asked 5 people in each household. It is not 1000 independent samples.
8 +16
9 -16
10 700 Mean
11 1000 Tosses Count Number of Heads
12 Add 200

in Table To:


© Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu

If you have any comments about this server, send e-mail to webmaster@npac.syr.edu.

Page produced by wwwfoil on Sat Mar 20 1999