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Does it? If you're asked "does this code belong to this programmer?" and flip a coin, you'll approximate 50% regardless of distribution of programmers. Of cou
by dllthomas 11y ago
Does it? If you're asked "does this code belong to this programmer?" and flip a coin, you'll approximate 50% regardless of distribution of programmers.
Of course, "const No" might do quite a bit better than 50%, depending on the distribution of the original sample (for that matter, so might "const Yes", but those distributions seem less likely).
- michaelt 11y agoWell, if there were 600 programmers, one of whom had written 649 programs and 599 of whom had written 1 program each, you could achieve 52% accuracy by always guessing the same guy. Of course, the paper explicitly says "For this experiment, we use 600 contestants from [Google Code Jam] with 9 files" so I think in this case the distribution was probably fairly even?
- dllthomas 11y agoI think you missed some context. Up-thread, someone raised the point that it's unclear whether the question was "Of these 600 programmers, which wrote this code?" or "Did this programmer write this code?", and this subthread is discussing the latter case.