Decision Maker

How to use it

1. Pick how you want to decide. Coin flip gives you heads or tails, Yes or No answers a question, and My own options picks from a list you type.
2. Press the button — or just hit the spacebar, which is faster when you are flipping a few times.
3. Every pick is added to the tally underneath, so you can see the split rather than take our word for it.

Three ways to decide

Coin flip

The classic two-way split: heads or tails, 50/50. Best for a genuine toss-up, for settling who goes first, or for breaking a tie when two people want different things and neither has a stronger claim.

Yes or No

The same even odds with the answer phrased as a decision rather than a coin face. Useful when the question is "should I?" and you have been going round in circles.

Your own options

Type one option per line and it picks fairly between them — three lunch choices, five names in a draw, eight tasks you have been avoiding. Blank lines are ignored, so a stray newline never becomes an invisible option, and you can list up to a hundred.

Duplicates are kept on purpose. Writing an option twice is a simple way to give it double the chance, which is the easiest form of weighting there is.

Is it actually random?

Yes, and in a stronger sense than most tools of this kind. The pick comes from crypto.getRandomValues, the browser's cryptographic random source, rather than Math.random. Math.random is fast but makes no guarantee about uniformity or unpredictability, and it varies between browsers. For a coin flip the difference will never matter to you; it costs nothing to do it properly.

The choice itself is a plain function: it maps that random number onto your options in equal slices, so with three options each gets exactly a third of the range. That function is covered by unit tests, including one that checks four options come out exactly even across four thousand draws.

Why five heads in a row is not broken

This is the single most common complaint about every coin-flip tool on the internet, so it is worth answering properly. A run of five heads looks wrong, but it happens about one time in sixteen once you have started flipping — roughly as often as rolling a specific number on a sixteen-sided die. In a hundred flips you should expect a run of five or more.

What people are really reacting to is the gambler's fallacy: the feeling that tails is now "due". It is not. The coin has no memory, so after five heads the next flip is still 50/50, exactly as it was on the first. When you hit a streak of four or more the tool says so, with the real odds, rather than leaving you to wonder.

The running tally is there for the same reason. Over a few flips the split will look lopsided; over a few dozen it drifts toward even. Watching that happen is more convincing than any promise we could make.

When not to use it

A coin is a good tool for decisions that genuinely do not matter, or where the options are so close that the cost of deciding exceeds the cost of choosing wrong. It is a poor tool for anything you will have to justify afterwards.

There is an old trick worth knowing: flip the coin, and the moment it lands notice whether you are relieved or disappointed. That reaction is the answer you actually wanted, and it is often more useful than the flip itself.

Questions

Is my list of options uploaded anywhere?

No. The whole tool is a function running in your browser, and your options never leave the page. They are kept in this browser's local storage so they are still there when you come back. See our Privacy Policy for the full position.

Can I give one option a better chance?

Yes — list it more than once. Two lines saying "Pizza" out of four lines total gives pizza a 50% chance.

Why did my tally reset?

Changing the mode or editing your options clears it, because a count of heads and tails means nothing once you are choosing between restaurants. Reset clears it manually.

How many options can I add?

A hundred. Past that the list stops being a decision and starts being a database, and a random pick from a hundred things is rarely what anyone actually wants.