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Wouldn't a better prompt be something like > Click the button to roll the die > (plausible dice roll animation is played) > Try to guess the result > (butto

by bogwog 5y ago

Wouldn't a better prompt be something like > Click the button to roll the die > (plausible dice roll animation is played) > Try to guess the result > (buttons labeled 1-6) That way there's no confusion about how to interpret the instructions, it's just people trying to predict the results of an event they perceive to be random and fair. When it asked me to create a "good" outcome, I didn't really know what it was expecting. If you roll a die 1000 times, the results are probably going to be evenly distributed, but if you only roll it ~12 times, the results could really be anything. Anyone who has played a board game can probably remember a time when it felt like the dice where loaded. I felt like making the random numbers too perfect would make it obvious that they were picked by a human, so I purposefully picked a lot of duplicate numbers, and at the end it guessed that I was over 60 years old (I'm less than half of that...)

ajmurmann 5y ago
I'm not sure if guessing the result would be any better. Knowing anything about a fair dice, you might as well just stick to the same result for all tosses. However, I approached the exercise in the same way as you did, as an adversarial game. I tried to generate numbers that would trick a human who is tasked with filtering out the series as random. No results repeating stuck me as a tell that the series was done by a human, so I included a fair number of repetitions of the same result that's still statistically plausible. Not sure how to work around that in the instructions. Edit: I think the study might say more about what the player thinks about other's expectation of randomness than about the player's own understanding of randomness.
- efreak 5y ago
  Speaking about fair dice, I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that as dice get used, dirt builds up in the pips, causing them to be slightly off-balance. I cannot find anything about this online at all, so it might well be complete nonsense made up by whoever told me. I have, however, found that dice are not random, and that 1 is a more likely result than anything else: https://www.insidescience.org/news/dice-rolls-are-not-completely-random https://www.insidescience.org/news/dice-rolls-are-not-comple...

by bogwog 5y ago

ajmurmann 5y ago

I'm not sure if guessing the result would be any better. Knowing anything about a fair dice, you might as well just stick to the same result for all tosses. However, I approached the exercise in the same way as you did, as an adversarial game. I tried to generate numbers that would trick a human who is tasked with filtering out the series as random. No results repeating stuck me as a tell that the series was done by a human, so I included a fair number of repetitions of the same result that's still statistically plausible. Not sure how to work around that in the instructions. Edit: I think the study might say more about what the player thinks about other's expectation of randomness than about the player's own understanding of randomness.

efreak 5y ago
Speaking about fair dice, I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that as dice get used, dirt builds up in the pips, causing them to be slightly off-balance. I cannot find anything about this online at all, so it might well be complete nonsense made up by whoever told me. I have, however, found that dice are not random, and that 1 is a more likely result than anything else: https://www.insidescience.org/news/dice-rolls-are-not-completely-random https://www.insidescience.org/news/dice-rolls-are-not-comple...