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As I understood it, their entire point is that younger people are not better at generating random sequences than older people, so guessing someone's age based o

As I understood it, their entire point is that younger people are not better at generating random sequences than older people, so guessing someone's age based on their complexity (randomness) score is completely unreliable. Towards the bottom of the page they said they've only guessed age correctly 51% of the time, which lines up with there being no correlation between age and ability to generate random sequences

thombles 4y ago
My point isn't the age result that I mentioned. (I believe their claim that it's bogus.) It's that the instruction to click "as randomly as possible" is ambiguous so at best they're measuring an average of the behaviours they think they are.
- Danieru 4y ago
  Those are the instructions from the original survey. Those if destructions being under defined, yes that is part of thr entire point.
  - dtech 4y ago
    They are not, these are the instructions from the reproduction > Tap a sequence of 10 dice rolls. Make it look as random as possible; another person should not be able to tell if you made it up or if it was from real dice rolls. And this is the excerpt from the study they mention > Click on a number between one and six as randomly as possible to produce the kind of sequence you'd get if you really rolled a die [...] I made the same mistake as thombles, the new instructions make it sound like the objective is to trick a human. The original clearly states the objective is to be random. They are not the same objective, as humans are terrible at recognizing randomness.
    - fweimer 4y ago
      Indeed. This is very odd for a study designed as a reproduction of a different study. Why use different prompts?
    - ascar 4y ago
      The [...] in your quote reads: > so that if another person is shown your sequence of digits from 1 to 6, he/she should not be able to tell whether these numbers were produced by a real die or just “made up” by somebody. I have a really hard time rationalizing why you would leave that part out of your quote and drew the conclusion you did. The original task was clearly also about creating patterns that a human would recognize as random.

thombles 4y ago

My point isn't the age result that I mentioned. (I believe their claim that it's bogus.) It's that the instruction to click "as randomly as possible" is ambiguous so at best they're measuring an average of the behaviours they think they are.

Danieru 4y ago
Those are the instructions from the original survey. Those if destructions being under defined, yes that is part of thr entire point.
- dtech 4y ago
  They are not, these are the instructions from the reproduction > Tap a sequence of 10 dice rolls. Make it look as random as possible; another person should not be able to tell if you made it up or if it was from real dice rolls. And this is the excerpt from the study they mention > Click on a number between one and six as randomly as possible to produce the kind of sequence you'd get if you really rolled a die [...] I made the same mistake as thombles, the new instructions make it sound like the objective is to trick a human. The original clearly states the objective is to be random. They are not the same objective, as humans are terrible at recognizing randomness.
  - fweimer 4y ago
    Indeed. This is very odd for a study designed as a reproduction of a different study. Why use different prompts?
  - ascar 4y ago
    The [...] in your quote reads: > so that if another person is shown your sequence of digits from 1 to 6, he/she should not be able to tell whether these numbers were produced by a real die or just “made up” by somebody. I have a really hard time rationalizing why you would leave that part out of your quote and drew the conclusion you did. The original task was clearly also about creating patterns that a human would recognize as random.