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by Exuma 498 days ago
Damn, that is cool
2 comments

It's a nice trick, but it requires a lot of extra coin flips. Imagine you have a coin with p(1)=0.501, and you want 1000 random bits. With the proposed method, this will take about 4000 coin flips. Surely, since the coin is quite close to being fair, it should be possible to do it with far fewer flips ...
Yeah this is probably the neatest little 5 second math thing I've ever seen. Can't believe I hadn't seen this before.