Simulation of Weighted Coin Toss

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MK96
MK96 on 9 Nov 2016
Commented: Image Analyst on 9 Nov 2016
Attempting to simulate 4 coin tosses for a weighted coin, e.g. probability of heads = 0.9772 and tails = 0.0228
I want to list all the possible outcomes e.g;
HHHH = 0.9772^4
HHHT = 0.9772^3*0.0228 ...
Was wondering if there is a quicker way to list the outcomes as later on I will be simulating a larger amount of tosses.

Answers (1)

Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 9 Nov 2016
Here's a way to compute heads or tails for a specified number of tosses and to list your strings of T's and H's.
% The probability of heads = 0.9772 and tails = 0.0228
pHeads = 0.9772;
numTosses = 200;
r = rand(1, numTosses) % Random numbers between 0 and 1
headTosses = r < pHeads
% Initialize character array to all tails
tosses = repmat('T', [1, numTosses])
% Assign the tosses that are heads to 'H'
tosses(headTosses) = 'H'
  2 Comments
MK96
MK96 on 9 Nov 2016
Thanks this helped a lot.
Do you know if there is any way to list all the possible outcomes and their probabilities?
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 9 Nov 2016
Not off the top of my head, but for 200 coin tosses, there will be 2^200 possible combinations so there will not be enough time in the rest of this century to show them all to you. Why do you need to know that?

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