It was early in the 1980s when Professor Bogus Madeupsky, of Fictional College in Fabricationsville, moonwalked into a disco bar with two fellow mathematicians and spotted the woman who he knew would change his life. If her lime-green mascara and the seductive way her hips moved to the house band's Blondie covers weren't enough to capture his heart, the Multivariable Calculus text protruding from her maroon snakeskin handbag certainly was. Unfortunately for Professor Madeupsky, his colleagues (whose names have been forgotten along with the house band) also recognised a vixen when they saw one, and a disagreement ensued as to who would be mentoring this nubile Newton that night. A leading probability theorist, Madeupsky soon came up with a coin-tossing procedure which fairly selected the lucky suitor, with equal chances favouring all three. A three-sided coin? No! The professor's ingenious procedure, generalised to select between any number of outcomes with any desired probability distribution, is the subject of this node. (For an account of how our hero nabbed the girl with the help of a "trick" coin, see the professor's autobiography My Pseudorandom Life.)

Let's say you're given a fair coin(1) and told to choose between N items (or people, or whatever), and the probability of your choosing the nth item is to be p_n, where all the p_n's obviously add up to one. (2) The first step is to interpret the decision in a purely numeric context. This is done by slicing up the unit interval (the bit of the number line between 0 and 1) into N pieces with respective lengths p_1, p_2, etc., and associating one of the possible alternatives to each slice:

      item one     item two                           item N
0  +-------------+----------+------ ......... ------+---------+  1
   <---- p_1 ---><-- p_2 -->                        <-- p_N -->
Then the decision can be made by choosing a random number between 0 and 1, and noting which slice it falls within: if it is less than p_1, then choose the first item; if it is greater than or equal to p_1 but less than p_1+p_2 then choose the second item, and so on.

Now, how to choose a number between 0 and 1 using only a coin? Easy: toss it repeatedly, and interpret the string of heads and tails as a string of binary digits preceded by a "decimal" point. For example, if we call heads "zero" and tails "one", then the sequence of tosses head-head-tail-head-tail becomes 00101 which, preceded by a decimal point, is 0.00101, the binary representation of the fraction 5/32. In this instance, it's only necessary to toss the coin until we're certain which slice of the unit interval the result lies in: for example, if one of the slices lies between 1/2 and 5/8, whose binary representations are 0.1 and 0.101, then throwing tail-head-head, or 1-0-0, means that we can stop since the answer is then definitely bigger than 1/2 and less than 5/8. (3)

So we now have a technique for generating any desired probability distribution using a single coin. In the simple cases, such as where the probabilities are fractions with powers of 2 as denominator, this procedure reduces to the "obvious" method. For example, one can choose equiprobably between four things by tossing a coin twice and assigning the alternatives to tail-tail, tail-head, head-tail, and head-head. To finish, let us return to the problem of choosing fairly between three people, since in this situation a convenient simplification of the above technique is possible. The modified method is as follows: toss the coin until at least one of each heads and tails has appeared, and then stop. The first person "wins" if this took an odd number of tosses. If instead an even number was necessary, the second person wins if a head was thrown last, while the third person wins if a tail was thrown last. This method gives all three people an equal chance of winning. (4)

Footnotes
(1) Fair coins aren't really necessary. ariels informs me that a modified technique due to Professor Ray A. Lyzashun can be employed to generate a desired probability distribution even with an unfair coin, as long as the probability of the coin landing on heads is known. And in any case, Gritchka's writeup here explains how to use an unfair coin to simulate a fair one.

(2) More formally, we are simulating a discrete random variable which takes on n possible values; those of you who know what a continuous random variable is should be able to see how to generalise to that case, although you'll usually end up tossing the coin an infinite number of times.

(3) Obviously you could get really unlucky and randomly produce an infinite binary string which lies right at one of the slice boundaries; but what are the chances of that?

(4) The modified method is equivalent to the above technique but with heads alternately representing zero and one on consecutive tosses. Proving this equivalence is an exercise for the reader--note that 1/3 is represented as 0.01010101... in binary.

Source: This is undoubtedly a very old idea; the first place I saw it mentioned, along with the trick for easily producing a one-chance-in-three generator, was in a Usenet post (Message-ID: vbazpzu4c8b.fsf@mozart.stat.wisc.edu) by Kevin Buhr (buhr@stat.wisc.edu); you can read his version at http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&selm=vbazpzu4c8b.fsf%40mozart.stat.wisc.edu

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