stupid
We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
251–260 of 361 posts
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It depends on the framework. I can tell a geometric figure is a square because it’s a quadrilateral with right angles and sides of equal length. You could ask me a question like “Is a rectangle with a side of length 1 and a diagonal of root 2 a square?” and I can tell it is. 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.
> It depends on the framework. I can tell a geometric figure is a square because it’s a quadrilateral with right angles and sides of equal length.
You're claiming to be able to craft a mathematical proof with 100% certainty. Although the thing you are proving appears to be obviously true (assuming a certain mathematical framework), the probability that you made a mistake is not 0%. You might falsely believe that the probability of making a mistake in a simple proof like this is 0%, but you would be wrong, and we have plenty of historical examples of mathematicians "proving" something and thinking that there is 0% chance of errors in the proof, only later being shown that they were incorrect.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “Make a sequence that looks random” is sort of a nonsensical ask. Looks random to whom? To other people. They specified this in the study instructions. (Not defending the study, I think it's flawed too.)
But they didn’t measure that. They’d have to measure that by showing a bunch of people each sequence and asking “is this random?” Instead, they threw a complexity formula at it, which measures some specific thing, but not “other people” Though perhaps there is a body of existing literature showing that their complexity estimator matches people’s assessment of “randomness”? If so, does it include people over 60?
> But they didn’t measure that.
That's correct.
> They’d have to measure that by showing a bunch of people each sequence and asking “is this random?”
Agreed!
> Instead, they threw a complexity formula at it, which measures some specific thing, but not “other people”
Yep, they botched the study.
Nonetheless, the "ask" that you criticized was fine. It explained that the subject should craft a pattern which would appear random to other people, and imo there's nothing wrong with that ask. The mistakes came afterwards.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#254> 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…
Here are some numbers: 123456123456 Did I get them by rolling a die?
There's no way of telling. I'll guess you didn't, but that's a guess about people, not about sequences of digits.
See, it's not about how likely it is that OP rolled 123456123456; it could have been any "unlikely" number (where I suppose "unlikely" is a psychological quality). So OP keeps rolling until an "unlikely" number comes up, and exclaims "Wow, how unlikely was that?". Well, it's impossible to know, without knowing how many "unlikely" numbers there are; but it's much more likely than 123456123456 is.
Aren't all sequences really equally unlikely? So whatever you roll, it's as improbable as all-1s?
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how effective it would be simply to count vowels mod 2. Much faster to calculate, at least for me.
I suspect there's a strong bias in vowelCount % 2. A quick look at English 100 most common [1] has 1's at 73% and 0's at 27%. That would even out with longer words but I wonder how much. Maybe there's something else that's just as easy with less bias? [1] https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/common-words-100.htm
Hm. That makes this puzzle all the more interesting. Maybe it's because I made a Wordle solver app recently, but word statistics are on my mind.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#256> 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…
Now I'm curious: in your opinion what is funny about the line "Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine" in the following cartoon strip, vs. something like "Two Nine Eight Three Seven Eight":
https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Random%20Number%20G...
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#257I 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…
Agreed, I deliberately used the linux RNG, and it generated T T T T T T T H H H H H Probably why I got an "age" of 60.
The age predictor seems broken, my sequence was scored as very random (90th percentile) and it still picked 60 for me.
Ironically based on eyeballing the chart it actually did predict my age within 5 years
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Exactly, and their "good" dice roll sequence, 3 1 5 6 2 6 3 4 4 1 contained the full set which should only happen ~1/4 of the time for 10 rolls. It also contained no number more than twice, which should happen I'm curious about how they scored this section because my overall age was reported to be 60+ with the sequence 2 1 5 2 6 2 2 4 6 6.
1/4 of the time and <7% does not make it impossible. In fact thats kinda the whole point of RNG.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
And funnily enough, you'll often hear this trait as being desirable in a pseudo-random number generator. People often want something that will jump around fairly unpredictably but that will come close to outputting all possible numbers once before getting into re-runs.
Yes, it's a very desirable trait in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Monte_Carlo_method Quasi-Monte Carlo has a rate of convergence close to O(1/N), whereas the rate for the Monte Carlo method is O(N^(−0.5)) For such applications it's best to use quasi-random numbers (a.k.a. low-discrepancy sequences) such as the Halton sequence or the Sobol sequence instead of pseudorandom numbers.
Thank you for the link - I had not heard of this kind of sequence. It looks like something I'd like to know about, but I think it's beyond my schoolboy-level mathematical abilities. Anyway, I guess I'll have a peek in the rabbit-hole.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#260I 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…
Agreed. This ends up being a test of one of a few things:
1. Whether people of different age groups agree that random sequences are more complex as defined by the study’s notion of complexity.
2. Whether people of groups have the physical ability to generate those sequences in a web browser.
3. Whether people of groups have the mental ability to generate those sequences.
Of these, the study purports to measure 3, but it’s actually conflating all of these.