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How to pick a random number from 1-10

torvaney.github.io

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Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10

#81

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

codetrotter wrote: post #56

> The easy thing to do is to ask someone “Hey, pick a random number from 1 to 10!”. The person replies “7!”. Seven factorial is way bigger than 10. Just kidding, sorry. But what I was actually going to say was, when I read the title of the post, before clicking through, I decided to think of a number myself and I chose the number seven. So it was fun to see that same number in the article. 10% chance in theory and in…

This past week I was reading Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman which has the same interaction:

> "Now me," said Mr. Vandemar. "What number am I thinking of?"

> "I beg your pardon?"

> "What number am I thinking of?" repeated Mr. Vandemar. "It's between one and a lot," he added, helpfully.

> "Seven," said the marquis. Mr. Vandemar nodded, impressed.

When I encountered the question the first number that popped into my head was also seven. This was immediately followed by the thought that if I were the one picking a number I should explicitly avoid seven. Does this question and answer pair give anyone else a strong feeling of déjà vu? I think this interaction is a meme [0].

It's also interesting that most people will limit their choice to a (whole number | positive integer). The best choice is probably an irrational number like the square root of two (√2) or pi (π). Although those are still relatively predictable since most people would probably make their selection from the small set of well-known irrational numbers, so you should go one step further and add to or multiply the value.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10

#82

Post by gizmo686 »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #81
codetrotter wrote: post #56

> The easy thing to do is to ask someone “Hey, pick a random number from 1 to 10!”. The person replies “7!”. Seven factorial is way bigger than 10. Just kidding, sorry. But what I was actually going to say was, when I read the title of the post, before clicking through, I decided to think of a number myself and I chose the number seven. So it was fun to see that same number in the article. 10% chance in theory and in…

This past week I was reading Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman which has the same interaction: > "Now me," said Mr. Vandemar. "What number am I thinking of?" > "I beg your pardon?" > "What number am I thinking of?" repeated Mr. Vandemar. "It's between one and a lot," he added, helpfully. > "Seven," said the marquis. Mr. Vandemar nodded, impressed. When I encountered the question the first number that popped into my head was…

Your best choice is probably to stick with rationals, and just list off an arbitrary number of digits to the right of the decimal.

Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10

#83

Post by spookthesunset »

umvi wrote: post #4

Or just use digits of pi; most people have at least 10 digits memorized, some have 20+ memorized. There's also a formula you can memorize for calculating the nth digit of pi, so you have infinite random numbers without memorizing an esoteric algorithm with a bazillion corner cases. That said, I still thought this was an interesting article and I loved the animated bar graphs.

That is pretty arrogant to think that just because somebody posts here they have 10 digits of pi memorized. This is a public forum. Anybody can post. You and everybody else posting here are in all likelihood just average intelligence.

There is nothing exclusive about using this forum. You aren’t the first or the last random person to exist here.

Don’t let your own supposition of your intelligence get to your head. There is even a theory for that.... Dunning Kruger.

Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10

#84

Post by umvi »

spookthesunset wrote: post #83
umvi wrote: post #4

Or just use digits of pi; most people have at least 10 digits memorized, some have 20+ memorized. There's also a formula you can memorize for calculating the nth digit of pi, so you have infinite random numbers without memorizing an esoteric algorithm with a bazillion corner cases. That said, I still thought this was an interesting article and I loved the animated bar graphs.

That is pretty arrogant to think that just because somebody posts here they have 10 digits of pi memorized. This is a public forum. Anybody can post. You and everybody else posting here are in all likelihood just average intelligence. There is nothing exclusive about using this forum. You aren’t the first or the last random person to exist here. Don’t let your own supposition of your intelligence get to your head. Th…

Memorizing digits of pi is easier than memorizing the algorithm in the article. 3.14159265, come on, stop making such a big deal of this.

Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10

#85

Post by OscarCunningham »

rbmktechik wrote: post #27
FabHK wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works and is perfectly uniform (if the people are i.i.d.), but requires quizzing around 20, 40, 60 or more people for a number before you can deliver one, while the algorithm described only requires one or two. EDIT: Not quite that many, more like around 9, 18, 27 or so, see below.

Parents algorithm always works, the one described has a massive failure mode - people slowly learn that they are likely to say 7 and self-censor by picking another number. Or maybe in a different culture the distribution changes (say China and the numbers 4, 8).

I would guess that in China the probabilities of 4 and 8 goes down. Asking people to pick randomly drives them away from special numbers.

Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10

#86

Post by OscarCunningham »

throwaway287391 wrote: post #59
justinpombrio wrote: post #25

...or just add up the answers mod 10. This has the property that if even a single person answers uniformly at random, then the final number you compute will be uniformly random, regardless of how everyone else answers.

> This has the property that if even a single person answers uniformly at random Has any human ever proven they're capable of this? Generating truly random sequences is more or less impossible for humans AFAIK. (E.g., see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19336754 which challenges you to do just that. Spoiler: you will probably fail miserably.) It's an interesting idea, but in practice I think relying on the assum…

"Just use your free will"

https://github.com/elsehow/aaronson-oracle

Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10

#87

Post by tfha »

duchenne wrote: post #76
oarabbus_ wrote: post #69

Am I missing something, or is this a textbook case of overfitting? It's a neat project, but at the bottom he prescribes what to do if the person says 1-3, or if they say 4 or 5, etc. Therefore, it's completely overfit to the Reddit data at the top.

Overfitting typically happens when the number of training samples is small compared to the number of parameters of the model. It especially happens when the input space is high-dimensional. Here the input space has a only one dimension. The model has 10 parameters. There are 8500 samples. So, the author safely assumes that no over-fitting occurs.

Wrong. You are assuming a good selection over the whole search space of humans. If you took HN I bet you would get a different distribution. The Reddit data only applies to sampling Redditors sampled using similar strategies, the generalization is limited by how general the collection strategy was
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