Illogical fallacy

by phil on Sunday Sep 13, 2009 1:29 AM

I like playing with logical fallacies. For example, we all know that that there's a 50-50 chance that a coin will be heads or tails (actually it's 49-51). But if a coin turns up heads 5 times in a row, do you think it's going to really turn up a 6th time heads? I mean, have you ever seen somebody flip heads 6 times in a row?? The coin owes you a tail by that point, right?

While that may be a logical fallacy, it may be practically useful to suspend logic and suspect that there's something wrong with the coin. If a coin turns up heads six times in a row, there's a higher probability that there's something fishy about the coin.