Welcome to another issue of our Shorts article! Today, we’ll discuss how flipping a coin isn’t exactly a game of chance…

Coin flips are used in many ways, as a game of chance to decide various things. Whether it’s for something important, like who gets the starting advantage in a tennis match, or something trivial, like who goes first in a board game, this game of chance is seen as a completely fair random method of deciding something, and is used across the world.

But is the coin flip always fair?

In 2007, Persi Diaconis (a renowned American mathematician) shared his theory of a coin flip not being entirely fair. The result that was more likely, he claimed, would be the side that the coin started on, rather than a random outcome.

A team of researchers, intrigued by this theory that had been believed by few others, looked into this. To ensure that results weren’t affected by the design of a certain coin, researchers called in a group of coin flippers to toss 46 types of coin, all produced in different countries. According to the researchers, 350,757 flips took place in the experiment, and led to the conclusion that there was a slight bias on coin flipping.

Whatever side was facing upwards at the start has a 50.8% chance of landing on the same side, according to the experiment. This is a result of a small wobble that impacts the coin that comes from the human thumb - when this wobble hits the coin, it causes it to spend more time facing up, which makes it more likely to land on that side.

Thanks for reading this week’s Shorts article!

Research sources: Interesting Engineering, PhysOrg, Futurism, Yahoo News, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, Engadget, Unilad, Smithsonian Magazine, Physics Forums, Reader’s Digest, Big Blue Interactive & Upworthy

Image sources: Read Riordan