Phys. Rev. E 52, 3608–3613 (1995)Coin tossing as a billiard problemReceived 17 February 1995; published in the issue dated October 1995 We demonstrate that the free motion of any two-dimensional rigid body colliding elastically with two parallel, flat walls is equivalent to a billiard system. Using this equivalence, we analyze the integrable and chaotic properties of this class of billiards. This provides a demonstration that coin tossing, the prototypical example of an independent random process, is a completely chaotic (Bernoulli) problem. The related question of which billiard geometries can be represented as rigid body systems is examined. © 1995 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.52.3608
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevE.52.3608
PACS:
05.45.+b
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