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We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

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Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#61

Post by semi-extrinsic »

jonplackett wrote: post #24

My idea of what random actually looks like has been affected a lot by generating random numbers with a computer. They just don’t actually look that random. I read an anecdote about the iPod shuffle (hey kids - it was a music player with no screen so you could not choose songs directly) - they initially set it to be genuinely random in the way it chose the next song - people didn’t like it. It didn’t _feel_ random to…

The iPod shuffle thing wasn't really about randomness, it was a UX failure. "To shuffle" means a specific thing. If I ask you to shuffle a deck of cards and give it to me so I can draw them one by one, I very much don't expect you to put each card back in the deck and re-shuffle it before every time I draw a new card.

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#62

Post by pseudo0 »

cormacrelf wrote: post #32
rmetzler wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if this is about perceived randomness shouldn’t people also guess which sequence was created by a human vs sequences created by some algorithm? I understand that to score randomness you probably would create n-grams of the characters and look if these would be equally distributed. But for such short sequences it feels hard to do. Maybe a statistician can explain this? For me, using my right thumb on a smartphone…

'Perceived as random' seems like a pretty junk measure of other humans' efforts at producing randomness. Garbage in, garbage out. Surely analysing this tells you absolutely nothing about anything? I would understand if the actual measurement is not perceptual but mechanised, i.e. "how small can we compress this stream of random choices using our best known compression methods" or something. (But then a stream of 10 s…

They link to a comprehensive description of the randomness score at the bottom of the page: https://www.complexitycalculator.com/HowItWorks.html

It gets pretty theoretical, but basically it's estimating the Kolmogorov complexity by looking at the size of the Turing machine required to generate a particular string, rather than Shannon entropy or implementations of common compression techniques.

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#64

Post by tsol »

andi999 wrote: post #5

If you cannot see the trend with looking at a diagram, and only algorithm then dont trust the algorithm.

This is what surprised me the most. It's admittedly been a long time since I took a stats class, but the trend line hardly looks like a trend. There hardly seems to be any correlation at all on either of the two charts with trend lines

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#65

Post by lqet »

thombles wrote: post #27

I understood my task as convincing another _human_ that it was randomly generated. Since N was low for each of the tasks, I was deliberate about sometimes having repeated values, and not ensuring that every option was picked an equal number of times, since that looks suspiciously algorithmic. Apparently I'm over 60.

Dito.

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#66

Post by tsol »

tomsmeding wrote: post #26

https://xkcd.com/1725/ . Those regression lines are absolutely laughable. Point cloud has line going through it, and beforehand I have no clue where the line will be (other than that it will go through the center, presumably). Even if there is a statistically significant effect, its meaning will be a rounding error.

Of course there's an XKCD for that. Yes I agree the trend doesn't seem very significant, even if it's statistically there

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#67

Post by plorntus »

I feel like a lot of the comments here are written after only taking the test and many are not reading the rest of the article.

The authors of the website are stating that they believe the study is wrong. The below/above 60 answer is showing you it’s incorrect half of the time along with data backing up the claim.

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#68

Post by gryson »

plorntus wrote: post #67

I feel like a lot of the comments here are written after only taking the test and many are not reading the rest of the article. The authors of the website are stating that they believe the study is wrong. The below/above 60 answer is showing you it’s incorrect half of the time along with data backing up the claim.

Yes, hilarious comments in this thread. Please at least skim the article.

Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

#69

Post by Jasper_ »

jonplackett wrote: post #24

My idea of what random actually looks like has been affected a lot by generating random numbers with a computer. They just don’t actually look that random. I read an anecdote about the iPod shuffle (hey kids - it was a music player with no screen so you could not choose songs directly) - they initially set it to be genuinely random in the way it chose the next song - people didn’t like it. It didn’t _feel_ random to…

In casual language, random means not "uniformly random", but something more like "without a discernable pattern". Playing a song from the same album is the start of a discernable pattern.
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