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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, you clicked the link?
I also decided not to answer your question.
I didn't press anything because it was a free will test. The instructions tried to get me to press buttons and I refused. Free will established.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"To maximize your free will, press the key that the robot tells you to."
Right! Someone please get dang to retitle this submission, so we can all finally stop equating free will with unpredictability.
> 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 alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he “just used his free will.”
Got it to 0.5991561181434598 after a while (totally random would be "0.5"). Not sure how "free will" comes into play, if there was indeed free will, I could have freely decided to only press one, and the Oracle would have had close to 100% certainty. Rather, what it measures is randomness or predictability, which is not the same thing as free will (especially "after the fact", e.g. after the choice is made).
The "free will" bit is more of a joke than anything, based on a quote from Scot Aaronson's book (explained in the GitHub Readme): > I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he res…
> I wrote a review of Steven Wolfram's book a while ago where I mentioned this, as a basic consequence of Bell's Theorem that ruled out the sort of deterministic model of physics that Wolfram was trying to construct. I didn't call my little result the Free Will Theorem, but now I've learned my lesson: if I want people to pay attention, I should be talking about free will!
1. Totally clear your mind of the previous letter and make each letter a separate decision. That way you only have to avoid being biased toward using one letter or the other too much. This is probably pretty hard.
2. Allow yourself to be aware of your previous answers, but thwart your own biases by including patterns that cancel them out.
I went with the second option and consistently got between .45 and .55. I know our main bias around randomness is not realizing how many runs and patterns exist in truly random data. So I occasionally included runs like "fff" and "dddd" and, rarely, patterns like "dfdf" and "fdfd."
Seems to me there's two ways of doing this: 1. Totally clear your mind of the previous letter and make each letter a separate decision. That way you only have to avoid being biased toward using one letter or the other too much. This is probably pretty hard. 2. Allow yourself to be aware of your previous answers, but thwart your own biases by including patterns that cancel them out. I went with the second option and c…
Got it to 0.5991561181434598 after a while (totally random would be "0.5"). Not sure how "free will" comes into play, if there was indeed free will, I could have freely decided to only press one, and the Oracle would have had close to 100% certainty. Rather, what it measures is randomness or predictability, which is not the same thing as free will (especially "after the fact", e.g. after the choice is made).
So. I have done a similar thing for a while now. I call it adversarial selection. I ask a participant(p) to guess a number [1,10] repeatedly. After they guess a number, I immediately tell them my guess of their selected number. Immediately after I guess they are instructed to make a new guess and tap the table indicating they have picked a number. The point is to go through these generations very fast. Often what I'l…
"I ask a participant(p)" Good forward planning to allocate a variable to hold a reference to the participant in case you need to refer to them later in the story, though in this case it turned out not to be needed. I need to start doing this in anecdotes. "So I was chatting with a colleague (C), and he mentioned..."