Say you want to flip a perfect coin, but the only coins available are imperfect. First, let’s consider the case where we don’t know the details of the available coins, and would prefer not to measure them. The simplest strategy is to flip a bunch of coins and determine whether the total number of heads is even or odd. As long as there’s a reasonable number of both heads and tails, the probability of an even number of heads will be close to one half.