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Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

people.ischool.berkeley.edu

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Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#61
post #57

I wonder... If you don't have access to randomness, e.g., you need to base your choice off some fixed program, and with some limited program length, in theory a perfect observer should be able to guess with certainty your next choices after some time, since there's only a fixed number of possible programs? Of course this isn't of much practical use...

Yes, the possible programs are enumerable, and you can start searching with the least complex programs and work your way up in complexity. Once you find a program that explains the available data, you cannot guarantee it will continue to explain possible future data, unless, like you mention, you constrain the program space to a finite set. What you're describing is generally how people make models of the external world.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#62
post #57

I wonder... If you don't have access to randomness, e.g., you need to base your choice off some fixed program, and with some limited program length, in theory a perfect observer should be able to guess with certainty your next choices after some time, since there's only a fixed number of possible programs? Of course this isn't of much practical use...

Yes, and this is actually a challenge in cryptography; a random number generator relies on 'random' inputs to work properly, e.g. keyboard / mouse inputs, time of day, random electricity noise, lava lamps (https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-produ...).

If these inputs or parts thereof are predictable, randomness decreases, making the cryptography ultimately weaker.

Re: Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

#68

The prediction algorithm is actually very straightforward[1]. It's a fun exercise to write a sequence generator specifically to defeat it. Here is a sequence that can get the prediction rate down to 13%: ddddd dfddd dffdd dfdfd ddfff ddfdd fdffd dffdf ddfff fdfdf dfffd ffdff fffff dffff ffddf fffdf dfffd ffdff ffffd ddfff Generated using this Perl script: my %table = (); my $s = "fffff"; for(my $i = 0; $i $table{$s}{…

>The prediction algorithm is actually very straightforward[1]. It's a fun exercise to write a sequence generator specifically to defeat it.

if you are inspecting the prediction algorithm, and you want to specifically defeat it, doesn't that mean copy the prediction algorithm and throw a "not" on it? It's the old halting problem trick...

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