[Tutor] Coin Toss Problems

[Erik H.]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2010 at 02:49:33 -0500, Colleen Glaeser wrote:
> 
> 
> First, write a function that simulates flipping a coin.  This function needs
> no parameters.  When called, it should return either “HEADS” or “TAILS”.  Those
> are strings.   That’s *return*, not print.

Looks good, though I prefer random.choice(["HEADS", "TAILS"]) to an if
structure, just because it's shorter. I'm sure endless debates can be
held about various ways to do this though :-)

> 
> When that function is working, write another function to exercise it.  This
> function should have one parameter, a positive number.  This function will
> call the previous function that number of times, and count the number of
> heads.  When finished, it should *return* (not print) the number of heads.

Your multiCoinToss function prints every coin toss. What it should do,
according to this, is count the heads and return that number.
Toss a coin, check if it's heads and if so count it. End by returning
the counter.

Btw, you might want to raise an error if your function receives a
negative number.

> 
> For each of these, print out enough to explain the result, not just a
> number.
> 

You'll want to calculate the ratio for every one of your head counts. 
Hint:
        print "Ratio %f" % heads/tosses.0

> 
> One more thing to do:  run the Pearson experiment 24000 times.  Report the
> number of times that the count of heads exceeds the number of tails.
> 

Once again, increment a counter :-)

Hope that gets you on your way!


Erik


-- 


Erik Heeren
E-mail: venefyxatu at gmail.com
PGP ID: 0xC5FE6DEB
http://blog.venefyxatu.be
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