11 ms·
Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle
- dsr_ 10y ago0.375 -- I guess I'm not perfectly random.
- teaman2000 10y agoWell, it's less about your 'free will' and more about one's inability to generate a random number. I'm not going to take the time to test it, but if you flipped a coin before each key press, this algorithm would eventually get to 50% accuracy. But in the short term it would probably be <50%, because it assumes it won't actually get random input.
- tedsanders 10y agoActually, if a player is flipping a coin, it is literally impossible to design an algorithm that has expectation other than 50%. Even in the short term, it cannot have an expectation that's <50%.
- Tomte 10y agoSklansky tells in the Theory of Poker that you need to be unpredictable when deciding whether to call a possible bluff, and "tune" it to the cards that are known. So you may need to make a yes-no decision where you decide on yes about 65% of the time, when you consider lots of those decisions. His solution? Glance at your watch. Divide the current minute into proportionate parts. See in which part the seconds hand is standing.
- zepto 10y agoNo explanation given of how this has anything to do with free will.
- RangerScience 10y agoClick through to the github
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- smoyer 10y agoI counted up from 0 in binary (excluding leading zeroes) and even with a completely predictable series, it only did slightly better than 50%. I was expecting more (that on-line game of 20 questions was freaky good).
- chki 10y agoWhich 20 questions game?
- IanCal 10y agoI'm guessing this: http://en.akinator.com/ http://en.akinator.com/
- vonmoltke 10y agoI have been having way too much fun with this, but it really goes off the rails sometimes. I am currently in a stream where the correct answer is "Ambrose Bunside". It asked me if my character has been dead for more than 100 years, then two questions later asked me if my character uses musical.ly. :/
- logfromblammo 10y agoIf the answers to both were yes, your character might have been a vampire, animate mummy, ghost, or lich.
- etjossem 10y agoI feel like it sometimes just wastes questions near the end when it's already narrowed the possibilities down. Maybe that's even on purpose, for showy effect. After all, it's pretty impressive when it appears to correctly get Frank Sinatra out of "does your character play video games for a living."
- rspeer 10y agoI'm guessing http://www.20q.net/ http://www.20q.net/, the original pretty impressive online 20 Questions game. (They were using the grating slogan "the neural net on the Internet" when neural nets were the pariah of AI. It's kind of amazing.)
- MarkPNeyer 10y agoWhat happens if i open the source code for this, run it in node, get the probability of guessing f or d, and then guess the one that's lower? This is like showing someone an elaborate mirror, and saying, "See? My copy of you does exactly what you're doing to do! You don't have free will!" All you have to do is put another mirror in the middle and show them that it doesn't work as they claim.
- GTP 10y agoYour premise "open the source code for this, run it in node, get the probability of guessing f or d, and then guess the one that's lower" goes straight against the explicit request to try to type randomly, everything that follows althoug may be correct doesn't apply here.
- ncallaway 10y agoChoosing to ignore the rules as prescribed is a great demonstration of free will.
- wickedgain 10y agoNice, thinking out of the "meta-box" here?
- Bromskloss 10y agoOf course, that's precisely what one would predict a user to do.
- abc_lisper 10y agoYou are onto something here. This reminds me of various hierarchies of logic(Bertrand Russell's arguments). To beat a person such as you, all it has to do is lie - and tell you at the end it has been lying all along.
- wickedgain 10y agoSure, there are ways to "break" it. The point here is to demonstrate that if you try to intuitively go for manual "non-randomness", you won't be as random as you think, sometimes surprisingly off from ~50%. Actually the quickest way I found to "break" it and hover at ~50% is to simply aim for the dead space between the "F" and "D" keys. If it was using non-adjacent keys like "F" and "J" instead it would be better for its purpose. "Q" and "P" might work even better since it would mostly force you to use 2 hands, making it much harder to score close to 50%.
- mkagenius 10y agoI am stuck at around 0.76. I think its flawed - Whatever I press it never changes by more than 1% How can the prediction for 'f' be 0.764 and for 'd' be 0.763 - they don't add up to 1.
- tedsanders 10y agoIt isn't telling you the odds of what you'll do next. It's telling you how often its hidden predictions been right so far. So if you've hit 100 keys, and it secretly guessed 75 of them right, it will display 0.75. The more you play, the more slowly this number moves, because each additional guess has a smaller effect on the overall average.
- coldtea 10y ago>The more you play, the more slowly this number moves, because each additional guess has a smaller effect on the overall average. Not exactly, seems to be a running average with a specific window.
- ianferrel 10y agoI assume it's a running success rate. It's making a (hidden) prediction about what key you'll press, and it's displaying the number of times it was correct over all your key presses. So, the more you've pressed the keys, the less each successive press will change it's overall success rate.
- cableshaft 10y agoI was able to get it to slowly go down, more or less, by switching things up whenever I saw the percentage start increasing. Usually kept doing the same key or pattern as long as it went down and as soon as it started ticking up I switched it.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoA couple things I did to get it down to ~.44 Press based on random environmental input (woman's voice on tv = f, man's voice = d, while flipping channels). Do it very quickly, while paying attention to something else that utterly absorbs your attention, and don't look at the meter.
- tehrei 10y agoIt's pretty good, got me at 0.76. It seems you can switch patterns to make it go down, but if you just mash f and d it rises pretty quickly.
- clock_tower 10y agoThis is pressing two letters, and you're explicitly told to press them in a way which feels random (which is going to be culturally determined). Aristotle would say that this is about habit, not free will -- unless you're opting to ignore the instructions.
- CamperBob2 10y agoCan you elaborate on how one's perception of randomness is subject to cultural bias? You do have to realize that frequent runs of repeated characters are expected to appear in a truly random sequence, but that's more a matter of basic reasoning (or perhaps education) than culture.
- Camillo 10y agoThere is a strong cultural bias for believing that everything is culturally determined.
- clock_tower 10y ago"FFFFFFFF" or "DDDDDDD" are random sequences if they're generated by a random process, but we [note: I wonder who 'we' means] expect "random" to mean "frequently changing" or "chaotic-looking". This might easily be more about formal education in statistics than about culture, though. I'd expect people from any culture we know about to have the intuitive expectations I mentioned -- identifying randomness with chaos.
- ikeboy 10y agoNot quite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmically_random_sequence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmically_random_sequenc...
- carapace 10y agoUm. This is a scientific "psychic-o-meter". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant
- ars 10y agoI got 0.62 I guess that means I'm not perfectly random.
- amasad 10y agoAt first I was stuck at ~0.95 but I was just striking the keys really fast but then I concentrated and looked at the keys and really tried to feel which key I wanted to press and it worked. I was able to score lower ~0.4. I'm computationally irreducible for now.
- mindcrime 10y agoWeird. When I tried to just "type random" without looking at the keys, it was routinely getting me around 75%. I tried looking at the keys as you described, and my score immediately dropped to around %50 and was even below %50 for a bit. Then it crept back up to around %60 when I started talking to a co-worker while typing.
- amasad 10y agoThere's been a number studies that showed that humans are bad at random number generation. e.g. "Humans cannot consciously generate random numbers sequences" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17888582 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17888582
- mindcrime 10y agoSure, but I'm curious why looking at the keys seems to matter.
- amasad 10y agoI guess that goes back to the original premise of the experiment. That "free will" is unpredictable. And the way I thought about it is that for me to have a true inclination -- not to just do it "randomly" -- I'd have to look at the keys and feel something.
- shkkmo 10y agoHumans are bad at random number generation, until you train them to do it. Randomness is a skill that can be learned like any other.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kurttheviking 10y ago0.49 -- for me it helped to close my eyes and picture a random bit stream (0=d, 1=f) rather than try to force my hands to "act randomly"
- tener 10y agoWish there was a mobile version. Can't play it on my phone.
- return0 10y agothat's it. i have no free will.
- timelincoln 10y agoI find this way more entertaining than I should
- timelincoln 10y agois this determinism's idea of a joke? that I should enjoy marveling at my own lack of free will? (did what I just say even have meaning?)
- vox_mollis 10y agoFairly consistently between .50 and .55 here.
- emblem21 10y agoIt guesses what key you'll hit next. It has a naive assumption of when I will hit it next. (Eventually)
- coldtea 10y agoSo?
- coldtea 10y agoGot it to 0.5991561181434598 after a while (totally random would be "0.5"). Not sure how "free will" comes into play, if there was indeed free will, I could have freely decided to only press one, and the Oracle would have had close to 100% certainty. Rather, what it measures is randomness or predictability, which is not the same thing as free will (especially "after the fact", e.g. after the choice is made).
- funkyy 10y agoI think I might have missed the point of this. Is this just a predictability score - really simple one?
- etjossem 10y agoRight. It tries to measure how random your brain's PRNG is, which has nothing to do with free will. A simple computer has no free will at all, but after being instructed to type randomly, it will score close to 0.5 without fail. The "free will" quote comes from a Berkley quantum computing student, who chose keys as independently of pattern as he could [1], and this seems to take it out of context. It might make sense to retitle this submission to something marginally less clickbaity, like "test how predictable you are." [1] https://github.com/elsehow/aaronson-oracle https://github.com/elsehow/aaronson-oracle
- SilasX 10y agoTo most people, "how predictable you are" and "whether you have free will" are almost the same question.
- zekevermillion 10y agoWe are rational beings, shouldn't we expect to have trouble being random? But wait, does that mean I don't have free will?! Aargh!
- stcredzero 10y agoCan this be used for game AI? I think it could. I wonder if people could apply this to games like Tennis? Or maybe to approaches to the basket in Basketball? I am using KeePass 1.31's Random Password generator with minus and underline. The oracle is getting 59%. Hmm. Also, when I generate a 64 character string with two possible characters, KeePass claims I have 72 bits of entropy. Hmmm!
- jjoe 10y agoIf you're left handed, use your right hand. And vice versa. I scored around <= 0.3 consistently.
- TallGuyShort 10y agoGood one. Right handed when really just typing as fast and supposedly as randomly as I can, it was at 0.99 and continuing to converge to 1. Left-handed (especially if I switch which fingers I use occasionally), I was < 0.4.
- hmm0a7fa8b60683 10y ago0.38 http://i.imgur.com/edu115W.png http://i.imgur.com/edu115W.png
- highd 10y agoI have an algorithm that can guess that sequence right 62% of the time then ;)
- hmm0a7fa8b60683 10y ago0.38 http://i.imgur.com/edu115W.png http://i.imgur.com/edu115W.png
- koralooo 10y agoHow can you test something that doesn't exist or is incoherent? Does weather have free will? Do dogs or wolfs have free will? Asking to test your free will is like saying "Test how much you're possessed by the Devil" or "Test your mind/soul/spirit".
- learc83 10y agoI didn't have a coin on my so I started tossing my keys on the floor and picking a letter based on the direction of the largest key. Ended up predictably around 0.5
- ernesto95 10y agoI wrote a timer in the developers console that logged either f or d depending on whether Math.random() was above or below 0.5 every second, typing the sequence that was being logged, the oracle consistently scored around ~0.4.
- fao_ 10y agoI got mine up to 0.8~ and decided to spend some time trying to out-predict the machine and get my score lower. I got it down to 0.6 before it got really difficult
- zzrg 10y agoWhen I was little (and had too much free time) I memorized many digits of some transcendental numbers. The only (semi)practical use I've found for that knowledge, is that I can use it as a reasonably good pseudorandom stream. If for some reason I have to choose things pseudorandomly. Pick an arbitrary starting point in pi, and press 'd' for even digits and 'f' for odd digits, I get around 0.49 accuracy with this oracle.
- grondilu 10y agoWell, that only shows that this oracle can be improved. It should be able to recognize that pattern from a well known transcendental number.
- jobigoud 10y agoThat might be a slippery slope though. Is a known random sequence less random than an original one? Should a randomness detector keep a database of all random sequence ever produced to give lower scores to known ones?
- snikeris 10y agoHaha, I did the same thing! From memory: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197969399375105 Now, the interesting question, how accurate is my recollection after all these years? Ack, one digit off!
- BucketSort 10y agoSo. I have done a similar thing for a while now. I call it adversarial selection. I ask a participant(p) to guess a number [1,10] repeatedly. After they guess a number, I immediately tell them my guess of their selected number. Immediately after I guess they are instructed to make a new guess and tap the table indicating they have picked a number. The point is to go through these generations very fast. Often what I'll observe is they try to mimic a random distribution by selecting a number far away from their last selection, but sometimes they somehow catch on and start saying things like the same number (rare) or a number close to it. This gets interesting because they usually start cycling between picking a number far away and close, but they do so with a particular pattern. I'm able to guess their numbers well beyond a random distribution, and it all comes down the the idea that they are trying to make a random number or trick me, which produces a blueprint of behavior.
- sillysaurus3 10y agoAre you sure the 10% chance isn't standing out more in your memory? It would be interesting to measure this over hundreds of guesses. It seems likely that the probability of guessing correctly would be around 1/9, since people rarely pick the same number, but is a sustained 1/8 or better really possible?
- jameshart 10y ago"I ask a participant(p)" Good forward planning to allocate a variable to hold a reference to the participant in case you need to refer to them later in the story, though in this case it turned out not to be needed. I need to start doing this in anecdotes. "So I was chatting with a colleague (C), and he mentioned..."
- joemi 10y agoTo be fair, it's kind of the same thing as just using someone's name: "So I was chatting with my colleague Chris, and he mentioned..."
- JoshTriplett 10y agoI was responding to a Hacker News comment (H), and it said...
- mangeletti 10y ago0.5072463768115938[1] but only did it for about 2 minutes (don't want to ruin my keyboard). That seems basically like it's unable to predict. 1. http://cl.ly/2c1R1X0z262i http://cl.ly/2c1R1X0z262i
- arielweisberg 10y agoSeems odd to call it free will. If you were 100% deterministic then sure you have no free will, but predictable, even very predictable is not the same as having no free will. Has anyone done a control test with an RNG to see what happens?
- sickbeard 10y agoIt says it will predict which key I will press next but it doesn't say which key it's predicting. is it f or d?
- JoshTriplett 10y agoI had a professor who, when playing games where the best move was to choose randomly (for instance, in a CCG, forcing the opponent to discard a card from their hand that you designate without seeing their hand), would always roll a die or otherwise mechanically randomize their choice, to ensure that they never exhibited potentially exploitable patterns in selection.
- mattfredfry 10y agoI chose not to press either button. The ultimate act of free will! (Just kidding, I got stuck around 0.63)
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoI'm on mobile. My choice was taken away from me.
- colanderman 10y agoI got it down to 0.51-something by simply switching keys iff the measure increased. Ironic, since I was exhibiting no "free will" by following that rule :)
- SilasX 10y agoI did that too and it worked for a short while, but then started increasing without bound. I wish it would list the record as you go.
- colanderman 10y ago1.0 is a fixpoint of that strategy! Since increasing values cause you to switch keys, and continually switching keys is perfectly predictable.
- rdiddly 10y agoI have pi memorized to a fair number of digits, so I decided to try that. d 3 times f 1 time d 4 times etc. ... and got 50% almost exactly.
- avip 10y agoGot the dude down to 0.4 by invoking pi. Pretty good predictor!
- talles 10y agoWhat this have to do with free will? It's a web page trying to infer the logic behind the user keystrokes. That's it. Maybe there's some randomness lying deep down in what we experience as free will, but that doesn't mean that we're 100% unpredictable in everything we do.
- wmf 10y agoThere are some physicists running around saying that free will is defined as acting randomly even though that's at odds with philosophical and common sense definitions of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
- aaron-santos 10y agoThere's a thread running through free will discussions referred to as "ultimate origination". The Free will theorem touches on this as the sibling commenter mentioned. There's a fringe view (also help by some of these physicists) that "The more radical group holds that the agent who determines his own will is not causally influenced by external causal factors, including his own character."[1] Start with section 3.2 of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and move on to perhaps the whole article or the referenced primary sources. My take on the link between the Aaronson Oracle and the ultimate origin view follows like this. Suppose that we take the radical definition of free will and try to devise a test that demonstrates an individual making a choice not influenced by external causal factors. One thing that comes to mind is to ask that individual to make a choice between two options. If the a choice is not causally influenced by external factors, then we can expect that it will not be predictable. It's interesting that a number of commenters have reported prediction rates very close to 0.5. Typically in similar hot hand experiments[2] that's not the case and I suspect it's a reporting bias (why should those closer to 1.0 feel the need to report their findings). There's also a bit of a counter-example in the whole space of pseudo-random number generation that's very much an example of a deterministic system with nothing but external causal factors, but will pass the Aaronson oracle test. On the other hand, truly random sources without any identifiable causal sources (ie radioactive decay) will also pass this test. Both of these passing support an argument that the test has no power to discriminate at all. My personal take is that I like the idea of thinking about having free will as a spectrum or degree rather than a binary proposition. In the ultimate origin conversation, I don't see external causal factors as being completely avoidable nor unavoidable so having a test whose output is a range of predicability is nice to see. [1] - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#1 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#1 [2] - http://math.williams.edu/the-hot-hand/ http://math.williams.edu/the-hot-hand/
- jiang101 10y agofixed dumb quotes error "main": "src/index.js", "scripts": { "test": "tape test/.js", - "watch": "runwatch "/.js" -r \"npm test\"" + "watch": "runwatch \"/*.js\" -r \"npm test\"" }, "devDependencies": { "runwatch": "^0.1.3",
- zkhalique 10y ago"Press the 'f' and 'd' keys randomly. As randomly as you can. I'll try to predict which key you'll press next. 0.4893617021276598 A rolling mean of my accuracy in predicting what key you'll press." So does that mean it's not able to predict with more than 50% accuracy?
- willfire1993 10y agohttp://imgur.com/qREH4Jh http://imgur.com/qREH4Jh I guess I'm pretty random. I don't know what using your free will has anything to do with this. In fact, this may be the opposite of free will.
- willfire1993 10y agohttp://imgur.com/qREH4Jh http://imgur.com/qREH4Jh I guess I'm pretty random. I don't think this has anything to do with free will, in fact, I think this is the opposite.
- DanielStraight 10y agoYou can use its own output against it. (Which means, ironically, it does not follow "know thyself", a maxim said to be from the Oracle at Delphi.) Fixate on a number fairly late in the sequence (the millionths place seems to work well). If that number is 5-9, push 'f'. Otherwise, push 'd'. Keeps it pretty consistently around 0.5.
- brianpan 10y agoYou got 0.5, but where's your free will now, human?
- Natsu 10y agoOne could also invoke that free will and simply not play the game at all.
- mevile 10y agoYou're playing this game, every day with every website you go to, every store you visit, every app you use, every interaction you make. Unless you live a (probably less comfortable) life in a rural area. These types of techs for the most part make out lives better.
- madmax96 10y ago>make lives better By some sense of the word. I think we over-value convenience, which is all most of this tech really gives us.
- joe_the_user 10y agoIt means either both the poster and the bot have free will or neither of them do! But seriously, the intuitive concept of free will, something like "unconstrained choice" leads to the idea that free will means simulating randomness - but once you're there, it looks more or less like nonsense - "acting randomly"
- andrewprock 10y agoI got it to .41 predictability. Does that mean I am a demigod?
- bumbledraven 10y agoAn idea I shared on "Can you behave randomly? (1998)" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753194) seems relevant here. The keypresses I entered were not predictable by the Oracle. I generated the keypresses by first picking an arbitrary integer in [0,59]. I then (using simple mental arithmetic) used that integer to seed a PRNG by George Marsaglia [1] to generate a stream of pseudo-random decimal digits. For each digit, if it was in [0,7], then I took the 3-low order bits of its binary representation, in order from least significant to most significant bit (0=f, 1=d). If the digit was 8 or 9, I discarded it. The PRNG I used has period 59, and only 20% of the output digits would have to be discarded. Therefore one could use this approach to generate up to 141 pseudo-random bits. [1] Marsaglia, George. "How to generate random number sequences (in your head)" https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sci.math/6BIYd0cafQo/Ucipn_5T_TMJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sci.math/6BIYd0cafQo/Ucipn_5...)
- avip 10y agoCan't you invoke a simpler random generator? Let's say primes % 4 ?
- bumbledraven 10y agoDo you have any references on the statistical properties of the primes % 4 sequence? When converted to coin flips, primes % 4 fails the statistical randomness tests at http://faculty.rhodes.edu/wetzel/random/mainbody.html http://faculty.rhodes.edu/wetzel/random/mainbody.html See results at http://imgur.com/iaHBNNr http://imgur.com/iaHBNNr ("Your nth attempt" is primes % 4, "Coin nth attempt" is the Marsaglia PRNG). Note that primes % 4 has too many runs, its prob(H given H) is too low, and its prob(H given T) is too high.
- avip 10y agoIt was meant to be read a question, not statement ("are you aware of a simpler PRNG I could pull from the top of my head, using basic arithmetics?"). Maybe a collatz sequence? You're right, apparently it's called Chebyshev's bias.
- grondilu 10y agoBeing predictable does not mean you have no free will. I mean, ever heard of compatibilism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
- etjossem 10y agoIf anything, this demo shows: 1. Unpredictability is possible even when the user doesn't have any choice about input (type keys based on a PRNG) 2. Predictability is possible even when the user can choose from both available options (human user) It's an interesting study in our ability to be random, but it doesn't tell us anything about the macro-level philosophical concepts of determinism or free will. Compatibilism is not relevant to this demo.
- visarga 10y agoFrom a physical point of view, free will doesn't make sense. Laws are deterministic at macro level and contain some randomness at the lower level. Neither are free will. Also, there is a huge assumption there - the assumption that there is a "self" that can have this free will. There is no self, just a stream of experiences and actions. The "self" is an intuitive concept, a reification that is useful in social dealings. Taking it from the social context and putting it in the realm of physics could be just a sleight of language - it cannot be the same concept in both domains, because the two domains are so far off. And trying to formally define a self in physics is impossible for us.
- drdeca 10y agoFrom a physical point of view, what are experiences?
- cgag 10y agoWell, no, I guess not if you switch over to some weak definition of free will.
- camiller 10y ago0.47058823529411764 is the first number to appear, kept it in the .5 to .57 range for the next 50 or so presses ... got board.
- Tomte 10y agoGot to 0.5000000000000001 and decided to stop there. :-)
- zellyn 10y agoIt didn't show anything until I pressed a bunch of keys. Then it came up at 0.3-ish. Then climbed to just around 0.5. I guess I'm fairly random.
- jff 10y agodd if=/dev/urandom count=1024 bs=1 | xxd -b Then I hit "d" for 1, "f" for 0 as I read through the bytes of output. It stuck around 0.5 the whole way, which is what I expected.
- moultano 10y agoI started reading "Quantum Computing since Democritus" recently, the book that inspired this, and it is fantastic. Highly recommended if you like an entertaining walkthrough of some pretty heavy theory.
- betenoire 10y agodisplaying the accuracy changes my behavior. I'd like it to log the prediction, result, and accuracy, and after a set number of configurable presses, it displays the report summary.
- lotharbot 10y agoI was able to hang at around 0.5 by remembering something I'd read on HN about identifying non-random strings because they did too much alternating and not enough repeating. Instead of trying to pick randomly between f and d, I picked numbers between 0 and 9, with an intentional bias toward lower numbers, and those would determine the length of the next sequence. So if I picked 4, 3, 7, 1, 3, 2, 2, 5, 0, 4 as my numbers, that would translate to ddddfffdddddddfdddffddfffff[0=don't change]ffff. I suspect a more sophisticated program would be able to pick apart my strategy, but it worked really well against this particular algorithm.
- cgag 10y agoI've been relaying the quote from the readme for years. If you didn't click through: "In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he “just used his free will.”
- Animats 10y agoI get 0.50877 after a while. What's the big deal?
- firasd 10y agoFor a sense of urgency, imagine you're Manny Pacquiao and trying to hit Floyd Mayweather without resorting to this predictable series of left-right punches https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZklifGarQc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZklifGarQc
- lucraft 10y agoIt's not very good, it's hovering around 0.5, which I think means it's guessing about as well as chance? Also it's broken in Safari.
- thesmok 10y agoIt doesn't work in Safari because they used arrow syntax for JS function, which is not supported in Safari: ` () => { `
- scottlocklin 10y agoStrictly speaking, this is a Shannon Oracle: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/245008/why-did-shannons-outguessing-machine-beat-hagelbargers http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/245008/why-di...
- lomnakkus 10y agoI realize that this is just a lark, but I just want to state for the record (as it were) that "free will" is such an ill-defined concept that any result from this is wrong and right at the same time. So there.
- Flimm 10y agoIt got to 1 immediately and stayed at 1 no matter what I did. Either this is a very impressive future predicting machine or there's a bug. .... Turns out it was because I was pressing the wrong buttons on my Dvorak layout keyboard!
- tgb 10y agoThis makes sense. The only reason you'd use Dvorak is if you had no free will!
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoI keep hitting both keys at the same time (from my point of view), but apparently I'm 80% predictable. What, does the IRQ for 'F' fire first or something?
- kqr 10y agoI'm not sure there has to be anything odd going on. If you hit both keys at the same time, you can never produce the same letter three times in a row – which is extremely predictable!
- ElijahLynn 10y agoCan't help but compare this to the American elections, 2 choices, republican or democrat. This algorithm should work on that as well... :(
- iammer 10y agoThis sequence gives a score of 0: f f f f f f d f f f f f f d d f f f f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d f f f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d
- roadnottaken 10y agoExplain?
- etjossem 10y agoThe carefully crafted (non-random) sequence above tries to fake out the script and succeeds every time. It reveals the script's own predictability, and why you shouldn't rely on it too much as a yardstick for testing your brain's psuedo-randomness.
- muti 10y agoYou can generate a sequence like this if you can see what the program thinks your next input will be, and choosing different. It's fairly easy to debug/modify the javascript to do this
- pmyjavec 10y agonext...
- x86pgmer 10y agoI tried pressing l and q repeatedly, I liked those letters better....
- Practicality 10y agoI didn't press anything because it was a free will test. The instructions tried to get me to press buttons and I refused. Free will established.
- etjossem 10y agoWait, you clicked the link?
- Practicality 10y agoI also decided not to answer your question.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cjslep 10y agoI was destined to create this reply.
- King-Aaron 10y agoIt was fate that lead me to read your reply.
- javajosh 10y agoClever girl. But you rely on the "keyhole property" that loses considerable information about you as a physical entity as make this joke. You would not be able to hide your micro-expressions, or the variability of your typing, from a properly placed sensor.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoClever counterpoint. :)
- Netcob 10y agoWhen I get to look at the average I can keep it under 0.5 if I change the key every time the number goes up (and I keep pressing the same key if that strategy stops working). As arguments against free will go... I think people with no short-term memory make a pretty solid case. You'd think with all the complex activity in our brains we'd at least behave a little randomly based on some chaotic processes, but without your short-term memory you begin to sound like a broken record.
- dicroce 10y ago0.52. The whole time I was trying to disconnect control of my fingers from my brain... Trying to get my hand to just do what it wants.
- gopher2 10y agoPressing in between the keys so I randomly hit both of them was the only way I could be unpredictable. That got a 4.9. Pressing back and forth trying to act as "random" as I could I stayed around a 7.8. Cool experiment
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- metaxy2 10y agoSeems to me there's two ways of doing this: 1. Totally clear your mind of the previous letter and make each letter a separate decision. That way you only have to avoid being biased toward using one letter or the other too much. This is probably pretty hard. 2. Allow yourself to be aware of your previous answers, but thwart your own biases by including patterns that cancel them out. I went with the second option and consistently got between .45 and .55. I know our main bias around randomness is not realizing how many runs and patterns exist in truly random data. So I occasionally included runs like "fff" and "dddd" and, rarely, patterns like "dfdf" and "fdfd."
- bobbles 10y agoOr assign a letter to each side of a coin and start flipping
- Houshalter 10y agoAlso see this version: http://www.loper-os.org/bad-at-entropy/manmach.html http://www.loper-os.org/bad-at-entropy/manmach.html
- ianopolous 10y agoThe following strategy seems to result in consistently 50% or less, typically ~45%: If it got the previous guess correct, swap the key, otherwise keep the same.
- recursive 10y agoI freely choose to be predictable. Randomness is not free will.
- cygnus_a 10y agoIt's simple to get it down to 50%. Don't try to be random. Watch the whites, and beat them with reds, game theory style.
- haddr 10y agofor me it's below 0.5
- fromthemorning 10y agoDo y'all mostly get significantly over 50%? I'm getting around 50% consistently.
- tangled_zans 10y agoI What would it mean, statistically, if it's getting it right less than 50% of the time?
- vacri 10y ago33% after it started responding and I got bored after 20 or so more attempts. I imagine it'd train up higher over time. But I have to agree with the posters who say that free will and predictability are not the same thing.
- emmelaich 10y agoSee also http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scisso...
- cfallin 10y agoThis is just a branch predictor! It would be interesting to play with more modern branch prediction algorithms (e.g., Andre Seznec's recent work) with the same interactive interface. I haven't seen anyone do this before...
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- rwallace 10y agoI failed to exercise free will in this case. Free will is in play as and to the extent that my future is determined by my decisions, rather than by other factors beyond my control. For example, if I'm walking down the street, I have free will in the matter of whether I go North or South, but not in the matter of whether I go up or down. I tried typing some letters because I was curious to see what the output would be. But for some reason, the page didn't work on my browser; no output was produced. Thus, my attempt to exercise free will was foiled.
- gravypod 10y agoI'm at 54%, does that mean I can get a job at google as a PRNG?
- jobigoud 10y agoIt says "My last guesses (most recent at bottom):" But the most recent guess is at the top.
- lisper 10y agoMan, that's an awful lot of code to do something so conceptually simple.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cabron11 10y agofddffdddfffddfdffddfdfddffdfdfddfdfdfddffdfdfdfddfffddffddddffdfd
- cabron11 10y agoffddfdfdddffddffddfffdddffdd