101–110 of 361 posts
If you cannot see the trend with looking at a diagram, and only algorithm then dont trust the algorithm.
This is what surprised me the most. It's admittedly been a long time since I took a stats class, but the trend line hardly looks like a trend. There hardly seems to be any correlation at all on either of the two charts with trend lines
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They are equally likely, yes. But, the questions here pertain to whether or not an other person would perceive your sequence as random. It wasn't too long ago there was an article on HN (can't find it now) describing what feels random to people. Essentially, a sequence feels more random the harder it is to explain. So, HHHHHHHH doesn't feel random because it's summarized as 8 H's and HTHTHTHT doesn't feel random eith…
But if this is about perceived randomness shouldn’t people also guess which sequence was created by a human vs sequences created by some algorithm? I understand that to score randomness you probably would create n-grams of the characters and look if these would be equally distributed. But for such short sequences it feels hard to do. Maybe a statistician can explain this? For me, using my right thumb on a smartphone…
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As I understood it, their entire point is that younger people are not better at generating random sequences than older people, so guessing someone's age based on their complexity (randomness) score is completely unreliable. Towards the bottom of the page they said they've only guessed age correctly 51% of the time, which lines up with there being no correlation between age and ability to generate random sequences
My point isn't the age result that I mentioned. (I believe their claim that it's bogus.) It's that the instruction to click "as randomly as possible" is ambiguous so at best they're measuring an average of the behaviours they think they are.
I am over 60 and it was correct in my case. Makes me feel really old now :)
I understood my task as convincing another _human_ that it was randomly generated. Since N was low for each of the tasks, I was deliberate about sometimes having repeated values, and not ensuring that every option was picked an equal number of times, since that looks suspiciously algorithmic. Apparently I'm over 60.
I feel like a lot of the comments here are written after only taking the test and many are not reading the rest of the article. The authors of the website are stating that they believe the study is wrong. The below/above 60 answer is showing you it’s incorrect half of the time along with data backing up the claim.
Yes, hilarious comments in this thread. Please at least skim the article.
> we decided to reduce our experiment to three tasks because of attention spans (not yours, it is exceptional if you are reading this).
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My point isn't the age result that I mentioned. (I believe their claim that it's bogus.) It's that the instruction to click "as randomly as possible" is ambiguous so at best they're measuring an average of the behaviours they think they are.
Those are the instructions from the original survey. Those if destructions being under defined, yes that is part of thr entire point.
> Tap a sequence of 10 dice rolls. Make it look as random as possible; another person should not be able to tell if you made it up or if it was from real dice rolls.
And this is the excerpt from the study they mention
> Click on a number between one and six as randomly as possible to produce the kind of sequence you'd get if you really rolled a die [...]
I made the same mistake as thombles, the new instructions make it sound like the objective is to trick a human. The original clearly states the objective is to be random.
They are not the same objective, as humans are terrible at recognizing randomness.
I 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 :)?
Here's a university that apparently is now providing a qrng service for free with live streaming: https://qrng.anu.edu.au/