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The coin can only generate a limited amount of entropy per flip, it could take arbitrary long to get enough to generate 1 unbiased coin-flip.

You could bound the time if you knew the exact distribution though. Not sure if there's a method that's guaranteed to meet this bound.




How could you bound the time if you knew the exact distribution? Like say it has heads probability p?


Yeah I may have spoken to soon. There's a minimum bound, but now that I think of it there's generally no reason to believe that any subset of outcomes for any bounded number of flips would have a probability of exactly 1/2. In fact this is impossible if p is transcendental.

The set of p for which there is a method to do it in finitely many flips is quite interesting though. It is bigger than the irrational numbers (it contains sqrt(1/2)), but smaller than all algebraic numbers. At the very least you'd need 1/2 ∈ Z[p], but that might not be enough.




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