Solved – John Kerrich Coin-flip Data

I hadn't heard about Kerrich before– what a bizarre story. The Google book scan (shared by reftt) of "An Experimental Introduction to the Theory of Probability" doesn't seem to include the body of the text. Feeling a little old-fashioned, I checked out a copy of the 1950 edition from the library.

I have scanned a few pages that I found interesting. The pages describe his test conditions, data from the first 2000 coin flips and data from the first 500 of a series of 5000 equally implausible-sounding urn experiments (with 2 red and 2 green ping pong balls).

Text recognition (and some cleanup) using Mathematica 9 gives this sequence of 2000 tails (0) and heads (1) from Table 1. The head count of 1014 is one more than 502+511=1013 in Table 2, so the recognition was imperfect, but it looks pretty good–at least it got the right number of characters! (Sharp-eyed readers are invited to correct it.)

Here is a graphical summary of this random walk, followed by the data themselves. The accumulated difference between head and tail counts proceeds from left to right, covering all 2000 results.

00011101001111101000110101111000100111001000001110 00101010100100001001100010000111010100010000101101 01110100001101001010000011111011111001101100101011 01010000011000111001111101101010110100110110110110 01111100001110110001010010000010100111111011101011 10001100011000110001100110100100001000011101111000 11111110000000001101011010011111011110010010101100 11101101110010000010001100101100111110100111100010 00001001101011101010110011111011001000001101011111 11010001111110010111111001110011111111010000100000 00001111100101010111100001110111001000110100001111 11000101001111111101101110110111011010010110110011 01010011011111110010111000111101111111000001001001 01001110111011011011111100000101010101010101001001 11101101110011100000001001101010011001000100001100 10111100010011010110110111001101001010100000010000 00001011001101011011111000101100101000011100110011 11100101011010000110001001100010010001100100001001 01000011100000011101101111001110011010101101001011 01000001110110100010001110010011100001010000000010 10010001011000010010100011111101101111010101010000 01100010100000100000000010000001100100011011101010 11011000110111010110010010111000101101101010110110 00001011011101010101000011100111000110100111011101 10001101110000010011110001110100001010000111110100 00111111111111010101001001100010111100101010001111 11000110101010011010010111110000111011110110011001 11111010000011101010111101101011100001000101101001 10011010000101111101111010110011011110000010110010 00110110101111101011100101001101100100011000011000 01010011000110100111010000011001100011101011100001 11010111011110101101101111001111011100011011010000 01011110100111011001001110001111011000011110011111 01101011101110011011100011001111001011101010010010 10100011010111011000111110000011000000010011101011 10001011101000101111110111000001111111011000000010 10111111011100010000110000110001111101001110110000 00001111011100011101010001011000110111010001110111 10000010000110100000101000010101000101100010111100 00101110010111010010110010110100011000001110000111