231–240 of 361 posts
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"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".
If it's light when I wake up, I would say that I can tell it's daytime, despite the possibility that it's still nighttime but a sufficiently near star has gone supernova or that the house next door is on fire.
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>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…
I agree with the article that the study is flawed in its unwillingness to exclude the all-H and all-T answers. But I’ll go further: the original study is just silly. “Make a sequence that looks random” is sort of a nonsensical ask. Looks random to whom? To our algorithm, is what they meant. There’s no such thing as a randomness test that can look at a sequence and decide “is it random?”, so this algo measures somethi…
> we only learned that older people pick all-H or all-T more. I think we learn that older people are less willing to put up with silly instructions.
My 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…
The iPod shuffle thing wasn't really about randomness, it was a UX failure. "To shuffle" means a specific thing. If I ask you to shuffle a deck of cards and give it to me so I can draw them one by one, I very much don't expect you to put each card back in the deck and re-shuffle it before every time I draw a new card.
> 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…
This seems to be really testing for pseudo-random numbers. Relevant Dilbert (and article): https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/~blackb/RNG.html.
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I mean, that makes sense. What I want when putting a music player to "shuffle" is not "give me something unpredictable" -- that's fundamentally what randomness means. What I want is "give me something new". Something new is not something random, it's something _different_ from before, if reasonably possible.
Which to a machine may as well be the same thing in either phrasing. You want something different from what you just listened to. To it, anything not 'that song' is different and 'new' potentially if also not 'just listened to' within a certain set amount of songs. Even without that certain set of songs being logged and considered; any picking of a different song from the last is verifiably random. Think of it all li…
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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…
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>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? 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…
If you're forced to pick random numbers between 1 and X in your head, pick instead from a wider range of numbers and then modulo X. Your brain will legitimately have no idea what number you're picking. e.g. for a range 1-6, pick from 100-250 instead and modulo 6 plus 1. There are of course brand new biases at play (is your new range cleanly divisible by X?) But it's enough to tamp down the original biases you're worr…
If X=2 I'm afraid my brain will have a pretty good idea about what number it's picking. Also people perceive odd numbers to be more random.
This would mean someone asks you to pick a random (integer) number between 0 and 1. That's just a coin flip, there's different/better methods for that.
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"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".
By this logic the expression "being able to tell" should be banned from the English vocabulary, because no-one is able to tell anything with 100% certainty. Requiring 100% certainty as a precondition of using this expression is silly.
Ask me “Was 1 1 1 1 produced by a random process?” and it’s impossible to tell in the way I did with the square.