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Did anyone even read the article. The study has nothing to do with complex behavior or "sophisticated" behavior. It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results, like "listing the hypothetical results of a series of 12 coin flips so that they would 'look random to somebody else'"
In high school, my math teacher once asked us to write down a random string of zeroes and ones, similar to what they did in the study to measure "cognitive functioning". He then asked us to count the number of times we alternated between 0 and 1. He told us that while most people try to have about a 50% split between 0 and 1, many alternate too often (0101101 instead of 0100011). Maybe there are other tests that one…
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/rng/stats_tests.html
For those who don't want to visit the link, some of the more intuitive examples:
* Ratio of zeros to ones (and in subsets)
* Longest string of zeros/ longest string of ones (and in subsets)
* Frequency of ngrams (00, 01, 10, 11, 000, 001, ...)
* Maximum cumulative sum (treating it like +1 -1)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great question. What are the speed requirements? https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-for-a-human-to-generate... You could probably come up with a reasonably good, fast mental PRNG algorithm, and practice that.
Pick a phrase (name, address, phone number would do), discard white space, and convert the upper two bits to binary. Example: "Pick a phrase" would become 00 01 11 11 01 00 00 10 01 11 01... That's certainly not random, but unlikely to be detectable for shorter sequences. (Edit: it probably is a fun exercise to write a program that decodes this code that reaches >75% (lossy) compression)
The test might also be scored using randomness tests that would pick up the repeated use of the same algorithm, like the one you described. Distribution of letters and their (ASCII?) bits won't be perfectly random. You could also hand code exceptions for known algorithms as you discover them.
That's what interests me. Monitoring your own cognitive ability as you age for early detection and tracking of neurodegenerative diseases. For this, you need a test that's resistant to practice.
In high school, my math teacher once asked us to write down a random string of zeroes and ones, similar to what they did in the study to measure "cognitive functioning". He then asked us to count the number of times we alternated between 0 and 1. He told us that while most people try to have about a 50% split between 0 and 1, many alternate too often (0101101 instead of 0100011). Maybe there are other tests that one…
Did anyone even read the article. The study has nothing to do with complex behavior or "sophisticated" behavior. It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results, like "listing the hypothetical results of a series of 12 coin flips so that they would 'look random to somebody else'"
That strikes me as a poor measure of true randomness.
Did anyone even read the article. The study has nothing to do with complex behavior or "sophisticated" behavior. It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results, like "listing the hypothetical results of a series of 12 coin flips so that they would 'look random to somebody else'"
That strikes me as a poor measure of true randomness.
What 'appears random' is better measurement that matches what people try to do.
People are not good at recognizing randomness, they confuse it with homogeneity. True randomness generates more human recognizable patterns than people think. If you as people to generate random string of 1's and 0's, they avoid long strings of 0's or 1's too much.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6accnw/plos_scienc...
Did anyone even read the article. The study has nothing to do with complex behavior or "sophisticated" behavior. It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results, like "listing the hypothetical results of a series of 12 coin flips so that they would 'look random to somebody else'"
That strikes me as a poor measure of true randomness.
yeah, but apparently barely declines untill say 60+. Speed suffers however. "The adult years were remarkable in that complexity remained at a high level for a protracted period, in spite of a slow decrease of speed during the same period. This suggest that during the adult period, people tend to invest more and more computational time to achieve a stable level of output complexity. Later in life (>70), however, speed…
It almost sounds like people try harder and harder to keep up with societal expectations of continued "sharpness"... until they hit some age where cultural norms say they aren't expected to be sharp any more. And then they stop trying, which causes an outsized decline as their lowered expectations of their own capability, feeds into lowered capability, which feeds back into further-lowered expectations.
As if there are no physiological factors at play?
I mean, tons of studies have shown declining mental capacity, degenerative diseases increase with age, etc. Even in animals that have no, or much less, "societal expectations for sharpness".
I wonder how/if this relates to the fact that many mental illnesses fully manifest around 25 as well. "Roughly half of all lifetime mental disorders in most studies start by the mid‐teens and three‐fourths by the mid‐20s." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1925038/
The brain reaches its full maturity around this age so it's unsurprising any mental illnesses reach their own peak in somewhat of a parallel. As a personal aside, it makes me question the sensibility of letting kids go off to war, vote, drink, or smoke before this age.
Why would that be "unsurprising"? It's not like mental illness is intuitively correlated with increases/improvements in brain functioning...
If anything, one would expect the inverse: for some mental illness the increase in brain functioning around mid-twenties would somewhat help reduce it.