Suppose you’ve written a program that randomly assigns test subjects to one of two treatments, A or B, with equal probability. The researcher using your program calls you to tell you that your software is broken because it has assigned treatment A to seven subjects in a row.

You might argue that the probability of seven A’s in a row is 1/2^7 or about 0.008. Not impossible, but pretty small. Maybe the software is broken.

But this line of reasoning grossly underestimates the probability of a run of 7 identical assignments. If someone asked the probability that the next 7 assignments would all be A’s, then 1/2^7 would be the right answer. But that’s not the same as asking whether an experiment is likely to see a run of length 7 because run could start any time, not just on the next assignment. Also, the phone didn’t ring out of the blue: it rang precisely because there had just been a run.

Suppose you have a coin that has probability of heads p and you flip this coin n times. A rule of thumb says that the expected length of the longest run of heads is about

provided that n(1-p) is much larger than 1.

So in a trial of n = 200 subjects with p = 0.5, you’d expect the longest run of heads to be about seven in a row. When p is larger than 0.5, the longest expected run will be longer. For example, if p = 0.6, you’d expect a run of about 9.

The standard deviation of the longest run length is roughly 1/log(1/p), independent of n. For coin flips with equal probability of heads or tails, this says an approximate 95% confidence interval would be about 3 either side of the point estimate. So for 200 tosses of a fair coin, you’d expect the longest run of heads to be about 7 ± 3, or between 4 and 10.

The following Python code gives an estimate of the probability that the longest run is between a and b inclusive, based on an extreme value distribution.

def prob(a, b, n, p):
    r = -log(n*(1-p))/log(p)
    cdf = lambda x: exp(- p**x )
    return cdf(b + 1 - r) - cdf(a - r)

What if you were interested in the longest run of head or tails? With a fair coin, this just adds 1 to the estimates above. To see this, consider a success to be when consecutive coins turn up the same way. This new sequence has the same expected run lengths, but a run of length m in this sequence corresponds to a run of length m + 1 in the original sequence.

For more details, see “The Surprising Predictability of Long Runs” by Mark F. Schilling, Mathematics Magazine 85 (2012), number 2, pages 141–149.