that's it. i have no free will.
Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
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Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#32I counted up from 0 in binary (excluding leading zeroes) and even with a completely predictable series, it only did slightly better than 50%. I was expecting more (that on-line game of 20 questions was freaky good).
Which 20 questions game?
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#33I find this way more entertaining than I should
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#34I find this way more entertaining than I should
is this determinism's idea of a joke? that I should enjoy marveling at my own lack of free will? (did what I just say even have meaning?)
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#35This is pressing two letters, and you're explicitly told to press them in a way which feels random (which is going to be culturally determined). Aristotle would say that this is about habit, not free will -- unless you're opting to ignore the instructions.
Can you elaborate on how one's perception of randomness is subject to cultural bias? You do have to realize that frequent runs of repeated characters are expected to appear in a truly random sequence, but that's more a matter of basic reasoning (or perhaps education) than culture.
There is a strong cultural bias for believing that everything is culturally determined.
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#36Fairly consistently between .50 and .55 here.
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#37At first I was stuck at ~0.95 but I was just striking the keys really fast but then I concentrated and looked at the keys and really tried to feel which key I wanted to press and it worked. I was able to score lower ~0.4. I'm computationally irreducible for now.
Weird. When I tried to just "type random" without looking at the keys, it was routinely getting me around 75%. I tried looking at the keys as you described, and my score immediately dropped to around %50 and was even below %50 for a bit. Then it crept back up to around %60 when I started talking to a co-worker while typing.
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#38It guesses what key you'll hit next. It has a naive assumption of when I will hit it next. (Eventually)
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#39I counted up from 0 in binary (excluding leading zeroes) and even with a completely predictable series, it only did slightly better than 50%. I was expecting more (that on-line game of 20 questions was freaky good).
The explanation of how it works says it uses 5-grams to predict the next bit, so if you use any sequence in which all 6-grams occur equally often, this won't be able to predict you at all.
Actually, an interesting challenge might be to construct a sequence that gives the Oracle as low a score as possible (is there a nicer simpler way to describe this than simulating the Oracle's code and always choosing what it doesn't expect?).
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#40Got it to 0.5991561181434598 after a while (totally random would be "0.5").
Not sure how "free will" comes into play, if there was indeed free will, I could have freely decided to only press one, and the Oracle would have had close to 100% certainty.
Rather, what it measures is randomness or predictability, which is not the same thing as free will (especially "after the fact", e.g. after the choice is made).