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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

#151

Post by NateEag »

lupire wrote: post #143
ForwardObserver wrote: post #140

It got less than half right, so worse than just guessing. Observation- predicting learned habits and other cognitive-effort preserving strategies your brain uses are not a refutation of free will. The whole point of habits, as Marvin Minsky pointed out in Society of Mind, is to save us from having to think through every little decision, i.e. to make ourselves predictable and unburden ourselves from decisions. So in t…

It's impossible to prove that free will does not exist. I could be losing on purpose. However, what the game does is refute a particular attempt to prove that will does exist.

I don't see how.

I think it's closer to an attempted refutation of a strawman.

As one who leans towards belief in free will and also towards compatibilism, and more importantly originates from a culture with a shared belief in free will (conservative Christian evangelicalism), I don't think anyone I've known who believed in it meant "I believe my actions are fundamentally unpredictable."

I think they just meant that they genuinely have an ability to choose between the options they perceive, and then to attempt to enact that choice.

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

#152

Post by withinboredom »

lupire wrote: post #142
withinboredom wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have two choices ... and I always predict the wrong one ... another way to say that is: "I always predict the one you won't choose." If I can't actually predict which one you choose, then statistically, I should be right 50% of the time.

So? If I can reliably lose every basketball game, that doesn't make be perfect at basketball. To put it more plainly: if you were wagering on the outcome, would you rather win 50% of the time (EV=0) or 100% of the time (EV=max)? 100% misprediction is only relevant if a 3rd party adversary is observing the game. In the absence of such an adversary, being reliably wrong it worthless.

You are comparing to things that don't even make sense in the current context.

You have two choices.

I predict correctly or I predict incorrectly. If I'm randomly guessing, I will be right 50% of the time (effectively, this is a coin flip). If I always guess incorrectly, then I'm correctly guessing the incorrect choice. If I always guess correctly, then I'm correctly guessing the correct choice.

I'm trying to explain why 50% is your target for "fooling the algorithm" and not 0%, which is not fooling the algorithm at all. There's no reason to be obtuse here, I'm legitimately trying to help you understand some statistics... this isn't an argument, it doesn't matter "what you believe" ... this is math.

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

#154

Post by benjaminbachman »

lupire wrote: post #142
withinboredom wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have two choices ... and I always predict the wrong one ... another way to say that is: "I always predict the one you won't choose." If I can't actually predict which one you choose, then statistically, I should be right 50% of the time.

So? If I can reliably lose every basketball game, that doesn't make be perfect at basketball. To put it more plainly: if you were wagering on the outcome, would you rather win 50% of the time (EV=0) or 100% of the time (EV=max)? 100% misprediction is only relevant if a 3rd party adversary is observing the game. In the absence of such an adversary, being reliably wrong it worthless.

50% or 0% are both interesting goals, but the headline implies that the website is some test of free will. If you get 0%, then it shows there is an algorithm that predicts your performance, and the Kolmogorov complexity is finite. That algorithm is the inverse of the one the website is using.

If we conflate "free-will" with "ability to generate truly random sequences" then the goal should be to generate a completely incompressible, unpredictable sequence, which 50% would probably be closer to.

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

#155

Post by cs702 »

boothby wrote: post #47
omoikane wrote: post #13

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}{…

You can improve that by around 13% if you soften the inequality (your > should be >=, I believe) table = {} s = 'ddddd' for i in range(100): if i%5 == 0: print(s) state = table.setdefault(s, {'f':0, 'd':0}) s = s[1:] + ('f' if state['f'] 0 else 'd') state[s[-1]] += 1

Inevitable. Gotta love HN.

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

#156

Post by eigenket »

munksbeer wrote: post #148
eigenket wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free will is equivalent to randomness with many (asymptotically infinite) degrees of freedom. I don't think this is obviously true. I can make a random number generating device with as many degrees of freedom as you like by producing a bunch of vertically polarised photons and measuring their horizontal polarisation. I don't think anyone would describe this system as having "free will". Conversely humans with "free…

> Free will seems to be qualitatively different to randomness. There is no such thing as free will, so any attempt to define it will fail. If we naively define it as something that isn't just pure randomness, but also something that isn't pure causality, then what is it? Either things are causal, in which case, you can replay everything and arrive at the same point. That doens't fit an intuitive definition of free wi…

> Either things are causal, in which case, you can replay everything and arrive at the same point. That doens't fit an intuitive definition of free will.

I think this is somewhat inaccurate. I'm not sure if I personally agree with it, but at the very least compatibilism is a serious philosophical viewpoint and shouldn't just be dismissed like this.

In any case I think the concept of "free will" is pretty much independent of randomness. If you provide me with some source of randomness (e.g. some quantum random number generator) I don't think I get more free because of it.

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

#157

Post by scythe »

endominus wrote: post #6

From the Github description, a quote: "In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternation…

I got 42% by just tapping the digits of pi according to even/odd.

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

#158

Post by DonHopkins »

Reminds me of the "second guessing" menus that one of Ted Selker's students came up with at Media Lab (sorry I don't remember her name). It inspired me to implement the same idea with pie menus, many years ago (when JavaScript was young and XML and XSLT were cool):

JavaScript Pie Menus

https://youtu.be/R5k4gJK-aWw?t=255

Transcript:

This was inspired by some research at MIT Media Lab.

This is a demonstration of pie menus that guess what your second choice would be.

When I click up [a pie menu], it allows me to select my favorite color.

Let me zoom in here. Well I think it's blue [point at blue]. No, red [point at red]! Ok.

So it says: "I think your favorite color is red, but your second favorite color is blue."

And that's based on the fact that when I popped it up, even though I [finally] selected red, I spend the most time selecting [pointing at] blue.

People tend to browse the pie menus like this, looking at things, and when they find what they like, they'll click it.

But then they'll pause to consider things.

So I can click up the menu, and go [point at] yellow, oh no, I'll just cancel it.

And now it's guessing my favorite color is yellow, even though I didn't select one.

This is a really simple elegant idea that I applied to pie menus, and it can be applied to a lot of other things, like e-commerce, or art galleries, or whatever.

I wrote more about it earlier in a response to a question about exploratory pointing (what I call "browsing" and "reselection"):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17123091

pvg on May 22, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]

Although, since you're on the line, I have a question about your last post. In all the research and measurement that's gone into pie menus, have people looked into 'exploratory pointing' in pie menus? It's very common when looking through a linear menu with a mouse (many people also do it with text selection while reading) but it's super clunky and jittery in the actual pie menus I've seen in the wild.

[...]

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

#159

Post by miika »

miika wrote: post #22

The question is never if we have free will or not. The question is if we are in a state where free will is available or not. For example, when I’m aware that there is space around myself, then I’m also aware that there are thoughts, feeling in the body, breath etc. In this state, I believe, it’s possible to choose. In this test I can choose the only press the other key and this algorithm doesn’t do so well. Then some…

Thanks for the comments.

Yea I also like to say that if my will is truly free, it's not under anyones control.

One thing I want to add: I think will and intention is also a question of scale or perspective. Bacteria is capable of making "their own" decisions but they probably cannot dictate which direction body is going to walk.

In similar way Planet Earth is under influence of the Sun, and the Sun is under influence of larger forces of the Milky Way and so on.

You could say that every level of existence is probably under a will of some level above and maybe each level can impose their will on levels below them.

From this perspective we could say that pure awareness is beyond physical body, brain and mind, so then if you want to really will your body it must be done from the state of pure consciousness - and then the body, brain, mind must follow as they're level below.

Anyways, don't take me seriously, this just entertainment.

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