This seems similar to the Monty Hall problem, which is also quite unintuitive. Perhaps what makes it work is that the person doing the predicting sees the sequ

This seems similar to the Monty Hall problem, which is also quite unintuitive. Perhaps what makes it work is that the person doing the predicting sees the sequence as a whole, and hence, future events are dependent upon historical ones -- and are no longer purely random. Consider this question, "You're somewhere in the middle of a 4 coin toss, and the last toss came up heads, what's the probability of the next one coming up heads?" I think the paper is saying it's a 40% chance -- you know you're in an finite series, and, you have partial information about that series.