Yes or no wheel

The arithmetic, out loud

This wheel opens with ten sectors: five Yes, five No. That is a fifty-fifty, and the odds table beside it says so in numbers rather than asking you to believe it.

The table exists because the interesting cases are not fifty-fifty. Add Maybe and you get three answers at 33.3% each — a different question than the one you started with, and worth seeing stated rather than assumed. Weight one side and the table moves with it. The sector sizes move too: a slice's share of the circle is always its share of the odds, so this wheel cannot show you one thing while doing another.

Why not a coin

For one person deciding alone, a coin is fine and faster.

The wheel earns its place in front of other people. A coin flip is over in a second, is easy to miscall, and leaves nothing to look at; a wheel takes long enough that everyone watches the same thing and agrees on what happened. It also lets you add options a coin cannot — a third answer, an unequal split, a Maybe — without anyone having to work out what that does to the odds.

Running it several times

The tally counts what has come up across this session. That is more useful than it first appears, because the reason people re-spin is usually that they did not like the first answer.

Seeing "Yes 1, No 4" written down is a useful thing to be confronted with. It does not change the odds of the next spin — nothing here does, each spin is independent — but it does tell you honestly how many times you have asked the same question hoping for a different answer. That is often the actual information.

When not to use this

Do not use a wheel for anything medical, legal or financial. Not because the randomness is poor — it is genuinely uniform and documented — but because those decisions are not fifty-fifty, and a tool that answers instantly and confidently is the worst possible instrument for a question that deserves advice.

The same goes for any choice where you would be upset by one of the outcomes. If you would re-spin on a result, the wheel is not making the decision; you are, slowly, while pretending not to.

A faster spin

This page spins for five seconds rather than the usual ten. A yes-or-no question is normally asked in the middle of something else, and the suspense that suits a classroom draw is just waiting when you are deciding whether to send the message.