> In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he “just used his free will.”
There's another version where a stats professor divides people into two groups. One group flips a coin 50 times and writes on a whiteboard the results. The other comes up with 50 results.
They leave the room and when they come back immediately know which is which. Specifically because of the over-alternation that yours mentioned. A string of HHHHHH is exactly as likely as HTHTHT, but people don't intuit that.
This isn't very interesting, but it scratched an itch I had to see what would happen.
The house's record
The house called 18 of your 190 scored numbers: 9%.
Blind guessing would average about 21.1 of them (11%).
Only 1 of the 206 people in a psychology study was more random than you. The house found you extremely hard to read.
I really want to know who was more random than a RNG
It might not be that someone is more random than an RNG, but that the distribution of numbers in your 190 vs. theirs appears more "random". It's a limited sample size.
If yours happened to contain consecutive digits or common ones (ending in zero, significant numbers like 911 or 42 or 69), that would imply less randomness even if it's actually the result of "real" RNG.
Alternating and advancing from both ends seems to work, it calls n-1, and n+1 correctly if the previous guess was n, but got no calls in a sequence like - 1, 8, 3, 7, 4, 7, 1, 7, 3, 8, etc
The first time I did badly. But the second time I got really far by deciding on a number instinctively and then picking something next to it. Maybe we instinctively pick similar numbers, but if we fight our instincts we end up with something truly random.
I found it interesting when I felt my focus shift from the number-generating task to noticing (and responding to) the house’s guesses.
As soon as I noticed it repeating its guess, I had a good long run of adversarially avoiding that number… it’s kind of fun being on the machine side of the slot-machine-type racket!
"You spread your picks more evenly than a random draw would. Your most-used number made up 23% of your picks, where a random draw's busiest number gets about 23%."
This is a nice spin on the Aaronson oracle:
> In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he “just used his free will.”
There's another version where a stats professor divides people into two groups. One group flips a coin 50 times and writes on a whiteboard the results. The other comes up with 50 results.
They leave the room and when they come back immediately know which is which. Specifically because of the over-alternation that yours mentioned. A string of HHHHHH is exactly as likely as HTHTHT, but people don't intuit that.
Must have been looking at some external random source
Rather than attempt to be random, knowing that I'm not, I wanted to see how well it can predict Math.random:
This isn't very interesting, but it scratched an itch I had to see what would happen. I really want to know who was more random than a RNGIt might not be that someone is more random than an RNG, but that the distribution of numbers in your 190 vs. theirs appears more "random". It's a limited sample size.
If yours happened to contain consecutive digits or common ones (ending in zero, significant numbers like 911 or 42 or 69), that would imply less randomness even if it's actually the result of "real" RNG.
Alternating and advancing from both ends seems to work, it calls n-1, and n+1 correctly if the previous guess was n, but got no calls in a sequence like - 1, 8, 3, 7, 4, 7, 1, 7, 3, 8, etc
Is anyone sufficiently paranoid that their first thought was, "Are you going to train a model on my voice?"
(Yes, I saw the "type the numbers" option.)
Why would they when there are thousands of hours of radio and podcasts do train on?
And all that GOOG-411 data!
No, I thought of the penguin of doom...
Ah, you see they are doing something far more random…
Yes, my mind went directly here
The first time I did badly. But the second time I got really far by deciding on a number instinctively and then picking something next to it. Maybe we instinctively pick similar numbers, but if we fight our instincts we end up with something truly random.
I guess I've skewed the totals a little, but the site agrees that the digits of π are random.
I found it interesting when I felt my focus shift from the number-generating task to noticing (and responding to) the house’s guesses.
As soon as I noticed it repeating its guess, I had a good long run of adversarially avoiding that number… it’s kind of fun being on the machine side of the slot-machine-type racket!
"You spread your picks more evenly than a random draw would. Your most-used number made up 23% of your picks, where a random draw's busiest number gets about 23%."
??? huh?
I got to 2/30 then it just guessed 7 from 30-50.
Did I break it?
blobrand dot com
House called 0 of 50. Huh?