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by prof_hobart 5356 days ago
A fair coin would be one that is equally likely to land on either heads or tails when tossed - on any given toss, you have exactly a 50% chance of getting either heads or tails.

A biased coin, on the other hand, has a bias towards one side or another - e.g. you could have a coin that lands on heads 75% of the time.

The question is - if you've got a biased coin, how do you get it to behave like the fair coin?

It's probably easier to imagine a 10 sided die. You've got one with 7 sides painted red and 3 painted blue, so you've got a 70% chance of rolling red on any given roll. But you and your friend want to be able to use this die to decide who's round it is next - guess the right colour and it's the other guy's round. If you were to base this on a single role, you'd obviously both want to pick red. So what you want is to be able to use this die to create two outcomes which are both equally likely to happen.

Does that help?