flip.coin()

Probability in flipping coins

Yihui Xie & Lijia Yu 2017-04-04

This function provides a simulation to the process of flipping coins and computes the frequencies for heads and tails.

If faces is a single integer, say 2, a sequence of integers from 1 to faces will be used to denote the faces of a coin; otherwise this character vector just gives the names of each face.

When the \(i\)-th face shows up, a colored thin rectangle will be added to the corresponding place (the \(i\)-th bar), and there will be corresponding annotations for the number of tosses and frequencies.

The special argument grid is for consideration of a too large number of flipping, in which case if you still draw horizontal lines in these rectangles, the rectangles will be completely covered by these lines, thus we should specify it as NA.

At last the frequency for each face will be computed and shown in the header of the plot – this shall be close to prob if ani.options('nmax') is large enough.

This animation has provided a simulation of flipping coins which might be helpful in understanding the concept of probability.

library(animation)
ani.options(interval = 0.2, nmax = 100)
## a coin would stand on the table?? just kidding :)
flip.coin(faces = c("Head", "Stand", "Tail"), type = "n", prob = c(0.45, 0.1, 0.45),
  col = c(1, 2, 4))

plot of chunk demo-a

flip.coin(bg = "yellow")

plot of chunk demo-b