Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

If anything, this demo shows:

1. Unpredictability is possible even when the user doesn't have any choice about input (type keys based on a PRNG)

2. Predictability is possible even when the user can choose from both available options (human user)

It's an interesting study in our ability to be random, but it doesn't tell us anything about the macro-level philosophical concepts of determinism or free will. Compatibilism is not relevant to this demo.

I was able to hang at around 0.5 by remembering something I'd read on HN about identifying non-random strings because they did too much alternating and not enough repeating.

Instead of trying to pick randomly between f and d, I picked numbers between 0 and 9, with an intentional bias toward lower numbers, and those would determine the length of the next sequence. So if I picked 4, 3, 7, 1, 3, 2, 2, 5, 0, 4 as my numbers, that would translate to

ddddfffdddddddfdddffddfffff[0=don't change]ffff.

I suspect a more sophisticated program would be able to pick apart my strategy, but it worked really well against this particular algorithm.

Yes, I think most people don't bring predictability into it at all. Free will is about the feeling of "I could do, or could have done, X instead of Y", but your search space only ever included X, Y, and Z. Just knowing your search space makes you highly predictable even if you maintain the freedom to choose inside that space. (And however we choose, it is not randomly, that would be terrible, but more chaotic in the same sense that weather has too many unknown inputs that we can't predict all the details we want to perfectly.)

I've been relaying the quote from the readme for years. If you didn't click through:

"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.”

From a physical point of view, free will doesn't make sense. Laws are deterministic at macro level and contain some randomness at the lower level. Neither are free will.

Also, there is a huge assumption there - the assumption that there is a "self" that can have this free will. There is no self, just a stream of experiences and actions. The "self" is an intuitive concept, a reification that is useful in social dealings. Taking it from the social context and putting it in the realm of physics could be just a sleight of language - it cannot be the same concept in both domains, because the two domains are so far off. And trying to formally define a self in physics is impossible for us.