Also see this version: http://www.loper-os.org/bad-at-entropy/manmach.html
Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
201–210 of 240 posts
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right! Someone please get dang to retitle this submission, so we can all finally stop equating free will with unpredictability.
It's a joke. From the github page: > 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…
If you just type 01101110010111011110001001..., you should evade any simple LZW-type compressor, as this string is (viewed as a radix expansion in binary) a normal number.
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#203So. 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..."
I was responding to a Hacker News comment (H), and it said...
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
To most people, "how predictable you are" and "whether you have free will" are almost the same question.
Whether or not determinism and free will are compatible is a very intricate debate that your throwaway remark doesn't do justice to. Look up Compatibilism.
Again, I was only speaking to the issue of whether it's misleading/clickbait to the average person, not whether they're really equal.
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#205The following strategy seems to result in consistently 50% or less, typically ~45%:
If it got the previous guess correct, swap the key, otherwise keep the same.
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, is there an easy way to generate that algorithmically without maintaining an explicit history? Is there a well-known sequence with that property? Do Gray codes have it, for example?
Yep ... Grays code was my immediate thought too.
The Gray code turns out to work if you require the n-grams to be aligned to n-character boundaries. So if you interpreted "00001111" as containing only the two 4-grams "0000" and "1111", you're OK; but if you allow arbitrary alignments, so that "00001111" contains the 5 4-grams "0000", "0001", "0011", "0111", and "1111", the Gray code doesn't work.
For example, the 4-bit Gray code (under this interpretation) when concatenated into a single bitstream begins "00000001", which then contains the 4-grams "0000", "0000", "0000", "0000", "0001", so the predictor gains an advantage right at the outset. (I didn't check whether it then loses its advantage over time... that's an interesting question.)
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
One could also invoke that free will and simply not play the game at all.
You're playing this game, every day with every website you go to, every store you visit, every app you use, every interaction you make. Unless you live a (probably less comfortable) life in a rural area. These types of techs for the most part make out lives better.
>make lives better
By some sense of the word. I think we over-value convenience, which is all most of this tech really gives us.
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#208I freely choose to be predictable. Randomness is not free will.
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#209It's simple to get it down to 50%. Don't try to be random. Watch the whites, and beat them with reds, game theory style.
Re: Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
You got 0.5, but where's your free will now, human?
It means either both the poster and the bot have free will or neither of them do! But seriously, the intuitive concept of free will, something like "unconstrained choice" leads to the idea that free will means simulating randomness - but once you're there, it looks more or less like nonsense - "acting randomly"
I think the intuitive concept of free will is more like "able to take meaningful actions" -- which means choices that express intent or desire. Sometimes your intent is to be unpredictable, to fool the algorithm. But sometimes your intent is to be consistent.