4 ms·

It's implausible that these characters just happen to appear with a language-like frequency distribution and are all meaningless spaces Really? If I w

by cbr 14y ago

It's implausible that these characters just happen to appear with a language-like frequency distribution and are all meaningless spaces Really? If I were to try to pick random letters I suspect I would end up mirroring the frequency that they appeared in English.

Groxx 14y ago
Probably not. People are bad at random: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/05/is-17-the-most-random-number/ http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/05/is-17-the-...
- wlievens 14y ago
  I think his point is valid exactly because people are bad at randomness.
  - Groxx 14y ago
    /me rereads Oh, heh, I can see it that way now. I had intended my comment to say that, since you'd be trying to reach that set of ratios to hide things, you'd probably fail miserably against any competent analysis.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  I think his computer/software is defective. Testing the "random distribution" like it was done - with a small sample size - is ineffective at best
jlgreco 14y ago
Probably depends on how you were picking them. If you were using something like DiceWare to pick letters from an English document, then yeah, you would nail the frequency. But if you were picking letters at random in your head, I would be very surprised if you got anything more than a very roughest of distributions. Anything more than "lots of e's, few q's" would surprise me. Humans rather suck at picking random numbers. We skew towards picking numbers that seem "more random", whatever that means (which would probably work in your favour for picking random letters with an English frequency, though I'm not too sure), but we also avoid "randomly" generating streaks of numbers, because we feel those are "less random". If you put two teams in a room, one flipping a fair coin (and writing down the results), and the other pretending to flip a coin but just faking the results, it is usually very trivial to pick out which team actually flipped the coin. They are going to have surprisingly long streaks of heads or tails. I don't have any evidence to necessarily suggest it, but I suspect this anti-streak tendency will tend to be strong enough to interfere with any correct frequencies which may otherwise appear. ("Oh my, this is far too many e's in a row..")

by cbr 14y ago

Groxx 14y ago

Probably not. People are bad at random: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/05/is-17-the-most-random-number/ http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/05/is-17-the-...

wlievens 14y ago
I think his point is valid exactly because people are bad at randomness.
- Groxx 14y ago
  /me rereads Oh, heh, I can see it that way now. I had intended my comment to say that, since you'd be trying to reach that set of ratios to hide things, you'd probably fail miserably against any competent analysis.
raverbashing 14y ago
I think his computer/software is defective. Testing the "random distribution" like it was done - with a small sample size - is ineffective at best

jlgreco 14y ago

Probably depends on how you were picking them. If you were using something like DiceWare to pick letters from an English document, then yeah, you would nail the frequency. But if you were picking letters at random in your head, I would be very surprised if you got anything more than a very roughest of distributions. Anything more than "lots of e's, few q's" would surprise me. Humans rather suck at picking random numbers. We skew towards picking numbers that seem "more random", whatever that means (which would probably work in your favour for picking random letters with an English frequency, though I'm not too sure), but we also avoid "randomly" generating streaks of numbers, because we feel those are "less random". If you put two teams in a room, one flipping a fair coin (and writing down the results), and the other pretending to flip a coin but just faking the results, it is usually very trivial to pick out which team actually flipped the coin. They are going to have surprisingly long streaks of heads or tails. I don't have any evidence to necessarily suggest it, but I suspect this anti-streak tendency will tend to be strong enough to interfere with any correct frequencies which may otherwise appear. ("Oh my, this is far too many e's in a row..")