Speaking of coin flips and probabilities. I'm curious to see how many of you can solve this logic question (without Googling the answer of course). My brother first heard it at a job interview and later he told me. I was able to solve it but it took me a good 20 minutes of thinking.
Here it is:
You have a weighted coin. When you flip it, it will either land on heads or tails, but not with a 50/50 probability. In fact, you don't know the probabilities (could be 51% chance of heads, 49% chance of tails.. Could be 99%/1%, could be 45.1234132452%/54.8765867548%).
How can you make an exact 50/50 decision every time with this unknown weighted coin?
von Neumann is probably your answer..