81–90 of 91 posts
I am conducting a survey as a first attempt to see what's going on. If you would be so kind, please take it here: https://j.mp/CoinFlippingSurvey If I get about 100 more respondents, I will release the data and analysis at the same link.
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In this context it's probably better measure of randomness than 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…
I don't quite follow what you're attempting to say here, I mean to say that the study is flawed because "It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results", with the inference that supposedly those who generate the most random results and those who appear by human estimation to do so are the same people, because humans are actually bad at randomness, exactly as you yourself say here. So what "appears ra…
Research goal was to measure cognitive ability and randomness is just measure stick. The actual mathematical complexity is correlated but there is human bias. The bias itself is irrelevant if it's constant. The relevant is how closely subjects can generate strings that appear random and complex (randomness with bias) for humans.
In other words
measure = statistical randomness + bias
Because the bias is almost universal (see the modulating factors in the article) it's not interfering with the thing they try to measure.
I am conducting a survey as a first attempt to see what's going on. If you would be so kind, please take it here: https://j.mp/CoinFlippingSurvey If I get about 100 more respondents, I will release the data and analysis at the same link.
It's not easy to click to the left or to the right 128 times. Can't you just replace it with a textbox where users type T or H, or something like that ?
The survey is intentionally dumbed down so non-technical users don't have to type much. You can almost say it is geared toward the general population, many of whom use smartphones.
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'"
it appears to be a way to measure complex behaviors, and higher cognitive functions, however - so I don't think the commenters are that far off.
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It's not supposed to be a measure of "true randomness" but a measure of the capacity to generate random-like results.
It's not supposed to be a measure of "true linguistic proficiency" but a measure of the capacity to generate linguistic-proficiency-like results. So in each case what's the gap between actual linguistic proficiency / randomness, and the appearance thereof? And of what value is measuring these human perceptions rather than the actual facts in each instance (like taking all the results and putting them into a scatter o…
That there are no hard constraints/expectations like in measuring the quality of a e.g. software random number generator implementation.
They don't expect to find true randomness in the results, just to measure how much randomness (entropy if you will) those various age groups are capable of producing.
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I don't quite follow what you're attempting to say here, I mean to say that the study is flawed because "It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results", with the inference that supposedly those who generate the most random results and those who appear by human estimation to do so are the same people, because humans are actually bad at randomness, exactly as you yourself say here. So what "appears ra…
The goal is the ability to generate strings that match the "approximate sense of complexity" (ASC) of the subjects. To do so requires the ability to avoid any routine and inhibit prepotent responses. Research goal was to measure cognitive ability and randomness is just measure stick. The actual mathematical complexity is correlated but there is human bias. The bias itself is irrelevant if it's constant. The relevant…
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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)
That would hurt you on speed. It's much faster to just pull numbers out of your head as fast as you can write them down. That should be protection against using an algorithm. Even if you do have a fast algorithm, it would still get slower as you age, so you could use it to compare yourself at different ages. The test might also be scored using randomness tests that would pick up the repeated use of the same algorithm…
I don't doubt that, but the context was to generate reasonably good (in the sense of "looks like independent samples from a 50/50 distribution") sequences.
Humans are notoriously bad at that (example: in the first 9 bits, one would expect four consecutive zeroes or ones. Try finding someone who produces that when 'just pulling numbers out f their head as fast as you can write them down').
I think this will be significantly better (as indicated above: for shorter sequences), even though it lumps a, e, i, n and r to the bit pattern '01'. It also can be quite fast, even if you do it by memorizing the mapping from letter to 1..26 doing 'mod 4', and conversion to two binary digits.
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Why? Do you suspect that subjects were deliberately making their choices less random because they anticipated the poor performance of another person in assessing randomness? It seems like a good assumption that they knew they were trying to fool a sophisticated randomness test that they couldn't second-guess.
No, just humans are well known to be bad at actual randomness.