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Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

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Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

#81

Post by snikeris »

zzrg wrote: post #65

When I was little (and had too much free time) I memorized many digits of some transcendental numbers. The only (semi)practical use I've found for that knowledge, is that I can use it as a reasonably good pseudorandom stream. If for some reason I have to choose things pseudorandomly. Pick an arbitrary starting point in pi, and press 'd' for even digits and 'f' for odd digits, I get around 0.49 accuracy with this orac…

Haha, I did the same thing! From memory:

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197969399375105

Now, the interesting question, how accurate is my recollection after all these years? Ack, one digit off!

Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

#82

Post by 3pt14159 »

zzrg wrote: post #65

When I was little (and had too much free time) I memorized many digits of some transcendental numbers. The only (semi)practical use I've found for that knowledge, is that I can use it as a reasonably good pseudorandom stream. If for some reason I have to choose things pseudorandomly. Pick an arbitrary starting point in pi, and press 'd' for even digits and 'f' for odd digits, I get around 0.49 accuracy with this orac…

I imagined how I would have coded it and so I devised a system to get it down as low as possible. I ended up with 0.44 accuracy. Pure random would have been better :)

Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

#83

Post by mpweiher »

coldtea wrote: post #40

Got 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).

Quickly got it down to 0.500001 or something, but now back to 0.54 :-(

Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

#85

Post by talles »

What this have to do with free will? It's a web page trying to infer the logic behind the user keystrokes. That's it.

Maybe there's some randomness lying deep down in what we experience as free will, but that doesn't mean that we're 100% unpredictable in everything we do.

Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

#87

Post by zkhalique »

"Press the 'f' and 'd' keys randomly. As randomly as you can. I'll try to predict which key you'll press next. 0.4893617021276598 A rolling mean of my accuracy in predicting what key you'll press."

So does that mean it's not able to predict with more than 50% accuracy?

Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

#90

Post by wmf »

talles wrote: post #85

What this have to do with free will? It's a web page trying to infer the logic behind the user keystrokes. That's it. Maybe there's some randomness lying deep down in what we experience as free will, but that doesn't mean that we're 100% unpredictable in everything we do.

There are some physicists running around saying that free will is defined as acting randomly even though that's at odds with philosophical and common sense definitions of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
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