X-no-Archive:yes
I think that the number of tosses does matter. Now, what do I remember about
probabilities from math class? With twenty tosses, the number of possible
outcomes are 2^20 (I think), which is 1,048,576. Six tosses make for 2^6
possible outcomes, or 64 outcomes, right? So six tosses have a one in sixty
four chance of all coming up heads. The odds of all of them being heads are
one in sixty-four. 2^20 / 2^6 = 2^14, or 16384. Or, viewed without this kind
of math, there are fourteen chances for any six tosses in a row to be the
six tosses out of twenty that come up all heads, just starting with the
sixth toss, and counting how many times you can get six tosses in a row out
of twenty - twenty minus six. At this point, I cannot remember how to derive
that number (64 / 14?), but the chances are pretty good. I would guess that
the point in a biology class would be, that * given enough chances *,
improbable things can happen. What is improbable in biology can be left as
an exercise for the reader (hint: Climbing Mount Improbable defends this
notion)... so is the question of who is tossing the coin... ;-)

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com