Live data from Hacker News

Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

people.ischool.berkeley.edu

11–20 of 240 posts

Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

#11

Well, it's less about your 'free will' and more about one's inability to generate a random number. I'm not going to take the time to test it, but if you flipped a coin before each key press, this algorithm would eventually get to 50% accuracy. But in the short term it would probably be <50%, because it assumes it won't actually get random input.

Actually, if a player is flipping a coin, it is literally impossible to design an algorithm that has expectation other than 50%. Even in the short term, it cannot have an expectation that's <50%.

Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

#12

I am stuck at around 0.76. I think its flawed - Whatever I press it never changes by more than 1% How can the prediction for 'f' be 0.764 and for 'd' be 0.763 - they don't add up to 1.

It isn't telling you the odds of what you'll do next. It's telling you how often its hidden predictions been right so far. So if you've hit 100 keys, and it secretly guessed 75 of them right, it will display 0.75. The more you play, the more slowly this number moves, because each additional guess has a smaller effect on the overall average.

Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

#14

I am stuck at around 0.76. I think its flawed - Whatever I press it never changes by more than 1% How can the prediction for 'f' be 0.764 and for 'd' be 0.763 - they don't add up to 1.

I assume it's a running success rate.

It's making a (hidden) prediction about what key you'll press, and it's displaying the number of times it was correct over all your key presses.

So, the more you've pressed the keys, the less each successive press will change it's overall success rate.

Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

#19

I am stuck at around 0.76. I think its flawed - Whatever I press it never changes by more than 1% How can the prediction for 'f' be 0.764 and for 'd' be 0.763 - they don't add up to 1.

I was able to get it to slowly go down, more or less, by switching things up whenever I saw the percentage start increasing. Usually kept doing the same key or pattern as long as it went down and as soon as it started ticking up I switched it.
Post reply on HN