I think the way the test is setup tends to create bias as it relies on mouse clicking and hence how people click on things is going to be a factor.
We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
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Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#72My idea of what random actually looks like has been affected a lot by generating random numbers with a computer. They just don’t actually look that random. I read an anecdote about the iPod shuffle (hey kids - it was a music player with no screen so you could not choose songs directly) - they initially set it to be genuinely random in the way it chose the next song - people didn’t like it. It didn’t _feel_ random to…
I used to be a game designer, and I worked on a lot of games with randomness mechanics and I analysed a lot of player feedback. How people at large perceive randomness is NOT what randomness is, of course. A task to create something that is random, and a task to create something that people perceive is random are two very different tasks.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#73Very interesting, and I think this part sums up the crux: “The researchers believe that you can only analyze the raw responses because, statistically, any sequence is equally likely to occur, so where do you draw the line?” I’d say that, as it is a psychological study, making claims about a human behavior, treating humans as pure random number generators without considering _intent_ is a mistake. It is entirely possi…
But how can you go from a random sequence to the intent of a subject? I don’t think you really can.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#74I am over 60 and it was correct in my case.
Makes me feel really old now :)
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#75My idea of what random actually looks like has been affected a lot by generating random numbers with a computer. They just don’t actually look that random. I read an anecdote about the iPod shuffle (hey kids - it was a music player with no screen so you could not choose songs directly) - they initially set it to be genuinely random in the way it chose the next song - people didn’t like it. It didn’t _feel_ random to…
I've had to deal with a similar issue for a product. We ended up summarising it in a fuzzy way that people's minds have a notion of 'micro' and 'macro' randomness.
In the case the coin flip, all heads or all tails is perfectly fine and will happen in macro random, ie if you took macro to mean > 1 million rolls let's say. But in micro random (the 12 rod we experience in real time) if that were to happen we'd feel uncomfortable and immediately assume it was cheated even if it was a product of true randomness because macro random suffers the same problems as very large numbers of slices of time
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#76Can anyone describe in a nutshell how measures of randomness work? Every sequence generated by independent random choices is equally likely, right?
The measure of randomness chosen in this particular paper appears to be an approximation of the Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity adapted for small integer/binary sequences. This effectively looks at how easy it would theoretically be to compress/describe the data, for instance HHHHHHHHHH would be low complexity as it could be encoded as '10 H's'. If something is truly random, it shouldn't be possible to encode it due to…
> If something is truly random, it shouldn't be possible to encode it due to the pigeon-hole principle.
This statement is obviously untrue.
“Random numbers” don’t really exists. The original authors were right about that. Every number/sequence is equally likely to occur. There’s even an XKCD about this [0].
I guess what you mean is: If you have a process that generates sequences randomly, most of those sequences are expected to compress badly.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a key point in the article. The researchers (original) did not want to throw out the data that doesn't "seem random", this group argues in favour of doing so.
Yeah, I read that part and I can't make sense of it. How are they deciding what is reasonably random?
Look at the graph of responses. There are a few clear clusters and lines outside of the main, statistically random cluster. Those other ones can be dropped.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#78I was trying to find a mental way to do a true coin toss. Anyone has ideas for how to truly dig into some randomness? Maybe most would think it's impossible, but aren't we at least better placed to do this better than deterministic machines (or maybe we are not - the true free will debate :)?
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#79> Do you think the questionable response looks genuinely random and satisfies the instructions? We don’t. Could someone explain why putting sequences of same choice is invalid? Sure, a probability of having many tails continously is low but how is it not random?
> Sure, a probability of having many tails continously is low but how is it not random?
Randomness is never about the output; it is a property of the source.
So what is not random, is that the frequency of people that output repeating sequences is higher than the quotient of that sequence among all possible sequences of the same size.
The issue of the initial paper is that it claims to conclude that people aged > 60 are less random, when they simply output a fully-repeating sequence with a slightly higher rate (which is not surprising taking into consideration that there are much, much fewer of them).
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#80It seems to me if you correct/don't correct for people who didn't follow the directions, what you've actually come up with is a graph of how well people follow directions, which peaks at age 30. I don't feel bad for being 57% random at age 58. 8)
I guess my ability to follow directions is about to nosedive.