How random can you be? (2019)

This might come in handy during boxing and other combat sports.

The prediction is deterministic, so you can adapt to it and "beat" it every time. Though intuitively and without looking at the implementation, I obviously am not a good adversary: Lowest I reached was 43% after ~50 inputs, stopped at 47% after 103.

With just tapping "randomly", it was looking good until I got 52% at 250 inputs. From there on it went steep downward: 59% at 500 but 57% again at 1000 (I changed how I tapped at the 500 mark; else it would have declined even more).

I mentally labeled my pulse as left... right... left... right... and whenever I blinked I took that direction. The tricky part is not thinking about what should be next. It's also a slow way to play, but I was winning until I clicked randomize!

I pressed right 6 times in a row. Apparently that's a very random thing to do.

This doesn’t really test randomness.

It appears that the guessing output is deterministic using your inputs as it’s inputs and you could figure out as many consecutive inputs you felt like to produce a specific outcome. For instance 6R1L3R inputs forces the game to “guess” wrong each time. It’s not guessing. This isn’t a random input, but it’s perfectly within a reasonable random distribution. Equally random is 10L, which the guesser will guess right each time.

Losing to the guesser doesn’t indicate a lack of random input, nor does guessing the opposite of the guesser indicate randomness.

We can’t really generate randomness. Only outcomes consistent with some distribution. It’s more of a philosophical point. If you made it it’s not random.