6 Mar
2016
6 Mar
'16
12:19 p.m.
It is correct that, if handed a truly-fair coin, then any tester of fairness would need to keep tossing it forever and would never be able to announce it is fair. Of course, any such test is necessarily at best one-sided, meaning it can detect unfair coins (and it should do so with probability=1) but it can never detect fair coins. It can and will make 1-sided errors, i.e sometimes branding truly-fair coins as unfair. But by design of the test we can make that 1-sided error probability be <=K for user-specified K>0. Re somebody criticizing me criticizing Salamin's coin test -- well, my criticism had asked him whether his intended scheme was really the one I refuted. He has not responded to my question, so far.