I was picking football teams for my office's weekly "pick'em pool", and decided to pick randomly.
Since I only had a pencil and a legal pad handy, and I only needed outputs of 0 or 1 (0 being the home team wins, 1 being the away team wins) I invented my own "random number generator".
For each 2-team matchup, I generated an output by:
- drawing a zig-zag squiggle (sine-like random waveform, with near-zero bias) using a designated ruled line on my notepad as the x-axis.
- Then I counted the number of times the waveform intersected the ruled line.
- Then took that number mod 2 as my output.
Assuming each waveform was long enough (i.e. had at least 10 local minima and maxima) is my expected output somewhere near 0.5?
Just curious.