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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

#201

Post by pessimizer »

nnoitra wrote: post #191
prolyx wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

111111 is just as likely as any other number. However, in practice, humans are far more likely to think of 111111 than other numbers, so we exploit the difference between the probability a human guesses a number vs. the probability of rolling a number on a fair dice. "Did I just roll a sequence X or am I lying?" vs. "What is the probability I roll sequence X next?" are quite different questions, if by "lying" you mea…

No, it is not. On average you expect equal number of 1s and 0s. All 1s won't be "equally as likely" .

All 1s isn't equally as likely as the entire class of outcomes that are not all 1s, but you can also say that about every other outcome (as long as we're talking about distinguishable dice or a sequence.)

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#202

Post by nonameking2026 »

alisonkisk wrote: post #179
gus_massa wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you roll a fair die a thousand times and only get 6s? Anecdote time: A few years ago with my friends we were discussing how easy is to roll 5 dices simultaneously and get the same result in all of them. This is a possible way to win a popular game here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generala We estimated how often you can roll the dices and the probability, and we estimated that you must try during 2 or 3 hours…

Saving a click: Generala is an ancestor of Yahtzee.

i clicked to upvote you and now I'm writing this text.

thanks for nothing.

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#203

Post by tidenly »

posix86 wrote: post #189
denton-scratch wrote: post #130

> so that if another person is shown your sequence of digits from 1 to 6, he/she should not be able to tell whether these numbers were produced by a real die or just “made up” by somebody. That instruction is a flaw in the experiment. It's always impossible to tell, for any given sequence, whether it was produced by a fair die. There's nothing an experimental subject can do to make the impossible more impossible. > t…

You're wrong. Mathematically. Here's why. When you throw a coin 100 times, each sequence you get is equally likely. However. You can look at properties of the sequence which are more likely to be one way than the other. For instance, it's more likely that the number of heads and tails are about equal than not. The reason is that there are more sequences, in general, where that is true, than those where heads or tails…

Your point doesnt refute OPs argument. Your final statement "you can say the latter is more likely random" is not the same as "you can say this sequence is not random". I think lots of people (especially programmers) who know about true RNG vs expectations of RNG might intentionally put in strings of same numbers, or not include the full set, because we know its what often happens during plain RNG. It isnt clear what the goal of the sequence is, hence the confusion in the comments.

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#204

Post by codegladiator »

gus_massa wrote: post #151
simias wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's always impossible to tell, for any given sequence, whether it was produced by a fair die. If the sequence is long enough you can model how likely it is to have been produced by a fair die. Are all numbers equally distributed? Are some numbers more likely to follow or not follow other numbers? Are some patterns repeating? Of course any sequence can be produced by a fair die, but you can still create some objecti…

> Can you roll a fair die a thousand times and only get 6s? Anecdote time: A few years ago with my friends we were discussing how easy is to roll 5 dices simultaneously and get the same result in all of them. This is a possible way to win a popular game here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generala We estimated how often you can roll the dices and the probability, and we estimated that you must try during 2 or 3 hours…

They are studying this

https://www.quantamagazine.org/elegant-six-page-proof-reveal...

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#205

Post by denton-scratch »

posix86 wrote: post #189
denton-scratch wrote: post #130

> so that if another person is shown your sequence of digits from 1 to 6, he/she should not be able to tell whether these numbers were produced by a real die or just “made up” by somebody. That instruction is a flaw in the experiment. It's always impossible to tell, for any given sequence, whether it was produced by a fair die. There's nothing an experimental subject can do to make the impossible more impossible. > t…

You're wrong. Mathematically. Here's why. When you throw a coin 100 times, each sequence you get is equally likely. However. You can look at properties of the sequence which are more likely to be one way than the other. For instance, it's more likely that the number of heads and tails are about equal than not. The reason is that there are more sequences, in general, where that is true, than those where heads or tails…

"he/she should not be able to tell" isn't the same as "he/she should not be able to make a statistically-probable guess".

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#206

Post by ryukoposting »

blackboxlogic wrote: post #94
kzrdude wrote: post #78

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 :)?

Look around the room for objects in sight. For each object, take its common name and count how many of the letters are "odd" letters acegikmoqsuwy, then mod 2. "Window" -> "wiow" -> 4 -> 0. Each word yields a single bit of very slow, pretty good entropy. Don't do this in the same room twice.

I wonder how effective it would be simply to count vowels mod 2. Much faster to calculate, at least for me.

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#207

Post by Forgeties79 »

easymodex wrote: post #195
RuggedPineapple wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can you roll a fair die a thousand times and only get 6s? Well yes of course. It'll never happen though. Somewhat related, but humans are also REALLY bad at generating randomness and one of our big tells is an aversion to repeats. If you ask someone to pick 0-9 randomly, repeatedly, they will rarely repeat numbers. But in a truly random sample a repeat is likely 10% of the time, and a three-peat will happen roughly…

Then again i had exactly this in mind and in OP tasks i did repeat a number here and there.

Yeah but even then most people cap the repeats if they’re faking. If 100 people have to roll 10 random numbers, it is very likely some people will have 3-4 in a row of the same number. It’s less likely none will. My brother in law teaches stats and he runs this scenario with a seminar he teaches. He then runs the results through a simple formula he built in excel and can ascertain who faked vs. did it for real with about 95% certainty IIRC. I love little games like that haha

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#208

Post by bogwog »

Wouldn't a better prompt be something like

> Click the button to roll the die

> (plausible dice roll animation is played)

> Try to guess the result

> (buttons labeled 1-6)

That way there's no confusion about how to interpret the instructions, it's just people trying to predict the results of an event they perceive to be random and fair.

When it asked me to create a "good" outcome, I didn't really know what it was expecting. If you roll a die 1000 times, the results are probably going to be evenly distributed, but if you only roll it ~12 times, the results could really be anything. Anyone who has played a board game can probably remember a time when it felt like the dice where loaded.

I felt like making the random numbers too perfect would make it obvious that they were picked by a human, so I purposefully picked a lot of duplicate numbers, and at the end it guessed that I was over 60 years old (I'm less than half of that...)

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#209

Post by awinter-py »

> We believe that there are obvious responses that are candidates for removal that make the data more true. The researchers believe that you can only analyze the raw responses ... filtering any data would be tampering with the results

interestingly millikan was accused of removing observations from his oil drop study to reduce the error in the electron charge. (but from like 2% to 0.5%, both far better than previous uncertainties)

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#210

Post by msrenee »

plorntus wrote: post #67

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.

I'd have read it if it weren't white text on a pink background. I'm not going through the trouble of pulling it up in a browser and undoing what they presumably did on purpose. Then to complain that people don't read the whole thing?
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