To be honest, this is an experiment I had though of as being an interesting one but never went into the trouble of doing. Dan Meyer however made it happen and thanks to him we can see that a human despite its good effort to imitate a coin cannot do that well. Why though? Subconscious? For instance you can see from the plot towards the end of the video that the human tries to be “random” by alternating a lot. For instance the sequences 000 and 111 appear significantly less often that then ones which alternate. If I were the human to switch the lights probably I would make up a “gedanken” coin and follow its will. For instance, learn how many words begin with each letter of the alphabet, split them in two categories such that each has probability 1/2 and then think of different songs and consider each fourth word that comes to mind. OK, may be too extreme. Was the first that came to mind :-). Easier ways to do it come to me now as well.

Here is the riddle of the day: what would you do if you were in the place of that human who tries to be the coin?  Also, what would you do if your coin has to be “fast” because you are in a room like the one in the video that follows?!