Or have them give the last digit of the age of their oldest living family member.
Due to the distribution of people's age towards the "old" end of the scale, I'd guess that this is more likely to be 0 than 9?
How to pick a random number from 1-10
91–100 of 183 posts
Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many people on HN have even seen a TI-83, I don’t think I’ve seen one since I sold mine when I finished the Danish equivalent of high school in 99. I mean, they were apparently discontinued in 2004, that’s 15 years ago.
I'm from the US and graduated high school in 2014; TI-83s were ubiquitous. I'm not sure if they were the original model or the "plus," though.
Probably the plus. The TI-84 Plus was the calculator my high school (and maybe middle school) offered - I graduated in 2016.
Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that most people have memorized the first 10 digits of Pi. I know 3 for certain, any more than that and I can look them up.
I think most would know the first 5 because it's pretty accurate making 3.14159 into 3.1416 and you forget what's after the 9
3.14159 might even be a stretch though. I'm pretty sure the average person (or american at least) would only know 3.14
Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10
#94There is a simpler solution if you do not mind leaving entropy on the table. Break the people up into groups of two without regard for their selection. If two people provide the same number, ignore them. Otherwise, output "0" if the first person's number is smaller then the second, and output "1" if the first person's number is larger. From this, you have a sequence of uniformly random bits, from which you can constr…
Works except when both people in every group give the same number
Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many people on HN have even seen a TI-83, I don’t think I’ve seen one since I sold mine when I finished the Danish equivalent of high school in 99. I mean, they were apparently discontinued in 2004, that’s 15 years ago.
In the US TI has established a multi-decade monopoly in schools. Basically, the teachers are only familiar with specifically them, so they require student only use them, so new teachers are only familiar with them. As a result, a new TI-85 equivalent is only trivially upgraded from what I used 25 years ago and costs exactly as much minus inflation.
Wow, why aren’t students using laptops?
Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10
#96Earlier 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).
> the one described has a massive failure mode
Well, if you're really interested in generating random numbers using a group of people, then yes, this may be a problem.
But you should take this as an illustration of the more general problem of generating uniform random numbers from a distribution that is not.
If you think about it this way, author's solution can be applied in a number of practical scenarios. For example, if you want to generate a hash values for objects using properties that are not uniformly distributed. Or if you want to generate random numbers from a physical artifact that is not perfectly uniform.
Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10
#97The general method illustrated here (rearranging a sufficiently uniformly distribution over 100 into a very-close-to-uniform distribution over 10) is a special case of a topic in information theory called randomness extraction:
https://cs.haifa.ac.il/~ronen/online_papers/ICALPinvited.pdf
https://people.seas.harvard.edu/~salil/pseudorandomness/extr...
The problem being solved is trying to obtain a distribution arbitrarily close to uniform from sampling a known random distribution.
Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yes, there is a possibility that the sample is biased. But that does not matter for this experiment.
The OP says that the model should be built with people in the same room than him, and then the human RNG should be executed with the same people.
As a consequence, OP has to capture the bias of the people in his room to make his RNG work.
The model would break only if the people in the sample change their strategy to pick random numbers after some time.
The data from Reddit is just used as an example of how to make a human RNG from redditer random picks.
As long as the training and testing are done from the same group of people, there is no issue, even if this group is biased.
Moreover, I don't see any prior reason to believe that redditors and HN readers would have different biases. That would be an interesting experiment, though. However, the predominance of the number 7 in article's data might be a western culture thing.
Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
7 is our special number.
Re: How to pick a random number from 1-10
#100[deleted]