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Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

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Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#171

Post by methodin »

It's always nagged me that statistical problems are scoped so small. Surely in saying there's 6 outcomes on a dice you'd obfuscated the billions of interactions between atoms and input possibilities in doing so. Thrower A and thrower B will undoubtedly throw slightly different which might actually constraint the outcomes and skew the 1 in 6 percentages?

It's similar to me to condensing 30 characters to 5 via an algorithm. You can go one direction but not the other and if your model was centered around the resulting 5 it doesn't really reflect what's actually happening which may skew the probabilities quite a bit. e.g. if the algorithm was "if first letter is not q, then first letter in output is q". If you were saying each has an equal percentage of occurring it'd be flat out wrong.

* I am not a statistician and have no idea what I'm talking about

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#172

Post by brchr »

andy_wrote wrote: post #63

There's a probability model called the Pólya urn where you imagine an urns containing numbered balls (colored balls in a typical example, but to draw the comparison with dice we can say they're numbered 1-6), and every time you draw a ball of a certain color, you put back more balls according to some rule. A few probability distributions can be expressed in terms of a Pólya urn, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3…

In the 1960s, the biostatistician Marvin Zelen proposed using something very much like the Pólya urn for clinical trials, calling it the "play the winner" rule [1]. This has had a major effect in causing a rethinking of the traditional randomized controlled trial, and these ideas are still making their way through the medical community today [2].

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2283724

[2] https://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulatio...

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#173

Post by guscost »

tylerhou wrote: post #20
_Marak_ wrote: post #11

I'm probably very wrong, but I still feel there is some undiscovered science when it comes to RNG and the fallacy of the maturity of chances ( Gambler's Fallacy ). Einstein believed the universe was deterministic. Just because it appears to us that there is no correlation between independent events ( the roll of a dice ), does not mean that there isn't some underlaying variable that we are unable to measure or percei…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

Bell's inequality suggests that reality must be either non-deterministic or non-local.

To the GP: You still aren't "due" for a win, that's silly.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#174

Post by Jasper_ »

drewrv wrote: post #15
ideonexus wrote: post #8

A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to he…

This is also an example of users saying they want one thing (randomness) when really they want something else (variety).

Because the casual definition of "random" means "without a discernible pattern", which multiple artists in a row doesn't handle. Music shuffle algorithms sometimes go lengths to avoid patterns and duplicate artists.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#176

Post by Paul-ish »

gpvos wrote: post #126
koolba wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simpler way that's guaranteed to not repeat a song till the entire set has been played is: Assuming you have N songs, pick a prime P such that N is not divisible by P. Then pick a random index I (0 Another method is to pick a random key K and sort the entries of the playlist based on HMAC(SONG, K) (where SONG is the name or other identifier of the song). This has a number of interesting properties. For starters the…

The prime method would mean that you would never hear some combinations of songs (for example, those who are an even number apart).

Wouldn't all random methods with some reasonable number of bits of randomness (eg 256) be unable to create all permutations of a sufficiently long playlist. The number of permutations of the playlist would be greater than the number possible random seeds. Eg a playlist with 60 songs has more than 2^270 permutations.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#177

Post by abritinthebay »

CryptoFascist wrote: post #151
abritinthebay wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t. Radioactive decay is practically the very definition of the quantum effects I mentioned.

Not counting radioactive decay as a physical process because you've chosen to define physical processes as deterministic is some intriguing mental gymnastics.

for the purposes described in the comment - I was quite clear that a certain level you get down to quantum effects.

But for the context of the physical processes the OP was talking about those effects are not significant and so I excluded them.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#179

Post by abritinthebay »

MereInterest wrote: post #129
abritinthebay wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t. Radioactive decay is practically the very definition of the quantum effects I mentioned.

Seems a rather odd definition to make, then. Radioactive decay has large-scale effects, such as determining The elemental composition of the universe. Quantum effects govern the entirety of the universe, so I'm not sure why you would want such a large exception to your generalization. I would go the other route. Nothing can be predicted, except statistically.

It's only odd if you're worrying about it outside of the context that the parent comment was talking about.

Which I wasn't. You clearly are. Yes, quantum stuff exists. At the scales the OP was talking about though they are mostly insignificant therefore I hand-waved them because they were not relevant to the discussion.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#180

Post by oe »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #112
ideonexus wrote: post #8

A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to he…

I had a few issues with Spotify doing this. I even saw a post where an engineer claimed it was all psychological, but I was definitely getting repeats when I had queued up a large amount of music (e.g. over 40 hours.) I think they only shuffle a certain percentage of the playlist and forget which songs have already been played after a while. I manually shuffle some playlists now. One nice thing about the desktop clie…

On mobile Spotify seems to heavily favor songs it has cached which results in the same songs being played every time a random playlist is started.
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