Have you ever discovered a Basilisk? No, not the “thought experiment” about how if you ever think of the world’s meanest computer, it’ll travel back in time to kill you. I mean more along the lines of the “Basilisk Image” from David Langford’s short stories: a concept or image which, from mere exposure, seems to deeply affect the human mind in unexpected ways.
I think I’ve found something similar. (It won’t kill you, but I did post a gif of it further down the screen.)
It’s pretty obvious at this point that humans are really, REALLY bad at probability. Any game designer will tell you that our basic intuitions of probability are flawed; that we narrativize “unlikely” outcomes as shocking even as repetition makes them a near-inevitability; that nobody has any idea what “80%” or “20%” or “99%” really feels like. Many games fudge the numbers towards what players expect, rather than what the numbers actually mean, because otherwise players will think that the real numbers are wrong.
So, the other day, I started thinking about coin flips. This isn’t my first time chewing on the subject; I got a couple months deep on a Balatro-like about flipping coins last year, before dropping the project for being too complex. This time, I decided to try out the most dead-simple version of the game imaginable: here’s a coin with an unfair probability tilted towards tails. You get to see exactly what that unfair probability is. You’ve got to get ten heads in a row to win. Good luck.
