151–160 of 183 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a good point, I guess you have to also randomly choose the humans?
I don't think so, if they were all lined up in alphabetical order and you took them in pairs from that ordering, it would be just as good.
There is a simpler solution if you do not mind leaving entropy on the table. Break the people up into groups of two without regard for their selection. If two people provide the same number, ignore them. Otherwise, output "0" if the first person's number is smaller then the second, and output "1" if the first person's number is larger. From this, you have a sequence of uniformly random bits, from which you can constr…
There is a simpler solution if you do not mind leaving entropy on the table. Break the people up into groups of two without regard for their selection. If two people provide the same number, ignore them. Otherwise, output "0" if the first person's number is smaller then the second, and output "1" if the first person's number is larger. From this, you have a sequence of uniformly random bits, from which you can constr…
That's pretty good, as long as each person can't hear any of the previous numbers! The article has the same issue, and might even be biased by the second person knowing they're the second person.
[0] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nick/aaronson-oracle/ind...
...or just add up the answers mod 10. This has the property that if even a single person answers uniformly at random, then the final number you compute will be uniformly random, regardless of how everyone else answers.
Survey for analysis on this thread: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XWML9JM
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Dh0wiTCRkBhckWGXtjZg...
(Amusingly, "69" is an over-represented response...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US 7 is a lucky # and a statistical outlier in that it was more frequently chosen in the article above.
You might be right, but my guess is that 7's reputation for luck isn't famous enough to make a difference, and in fact it's common because other numbers seem too "unrandom". We could test by asking people to pick numbers less than 100. I bet people would focus on odd numbers, especially those greater than 50, not ending in 5 or not having both digits the same.
Data and light analysis is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Dh0wiTCRkBhckWGXtjZg...
I definitely overpaid on Mechanical Turk per response, given how lightning quickly the data came in. (I decided to pay $0.10/HIT for 50 responses and got 68 responses in 8m26s.) I suspect that offering a nickel would have gotten the survey filled in under half an hour still...
There is a simpler solution if you do not mind leaving entropy on the table. Break the people up into groups of two without regard for their selection. If two people provide the same number, ignore them. Otherwise, output "0" if the first person's number is smaller then the second, and output "1" if the first person's number is larger. From this, you have a sequence of uniformly random bits, from which you can constr…