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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:

  1. 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.
  2. Then I counted the number of times the waveform intersected the ruled line.
  3. 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.

  • 5
    No, it will only depend on your habits about starting and ending the squiggle either above or below the axis.2012-10-11
  • 0
    [Randomness tests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_tests) might be of interest. They're all just heuristics, though.2012-10-11
  • 8
    Trade the pencil with someone else for a quarter. And then use the quarter.2012-10-12

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