Show HN: How Random Are You? (lab.specr.net)

62 pointsby vunderba6 hours ago30 comments

costco 4 hours ago

This is a nice spin on the Aaronson oracle:

> 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.”

faeyanpiraat 4 hours ago

Must have been looking at some external random source

tyre 3 hours ago

There's another version where a stats professor divides people into two groups. One group flips a coin 50 times and writes on a whiteboard the results. The other comes up with 50 results.

They leave the room and when they come back immediately know which is which. Specifically because of the over-alternation that yours mentioned. A string of HHHHHH is exactly as likely as HTHTHT, but people don't intuit that.

cubefox 12 minutes ago

Here it is:

https://aaronsonoracle.com/

steve_adams_86 3 hours ago

Rather than attempt to be random, knowing that I'm not, I wanted to see how well it can predict Math.random:

    setInterval(() => {
      const num = Math.round(Math.random() * 10);
      const ball = document.querySelector(`.typed-pad .ball-${num}`);
      if (ball) {
        ball.click();
      }
    }, 1000);

This isn't very interesting, but it scratched an itch I had to see what would happen.

    The house's record

    The house called 18 of your 190 scored numbers: 9%.

    Blind guessing would average about 21.1 of them (11%).

    Only 1 of the 206 people in a psychology study was more random than you. The house found you extremely hard to read.

I really want to know who was more random than a RNG

tyre 3 hours ago

It might not be that someone is more random than an RNG, but that the distribution of numbers in your 190 vs. theirs appears more "random". It's a limited sample size.

If yours happened to contain consecutive digits or common ones (ending in zero, significant numbers like 911 or 42 or 69), that would imply less randomness even if it's actually the result of "real" RNG.

shric an hour ago

I know pi to 100 decimal places and so that was pretty easy to cheat it

pavel_lishin 5 hours ago

Is anyone sufficiently paranoid that their first thought was, "Are you going to train a model on my voice?"

(Yes, I saw the "type the numbers" option.)

progforlyfe 5 hours ago

Yes, my mind went directly here

_diyar 4 hours ago

Why would they when there are thousands of hours of radio and podcasts do train on?

stronglikedan 4 hours ago

And all that GOOG-411 data!

scottyah 2 hours ago

Maybe they are not training to make a TTS, but training on accents to make STT.

andai an hour ago

"Hey its me ur grandson"

AnthonBerg 4 hours ago

Ah, you see they are doing something far more random…

panzagl 4 hours ago

No, I thought of the penguin of doom...

d3Xt3r 3 hours ago

Holds up spork

Trusteando 3 hours ago

What about the following strategy? You first think of a random integer n1 from 1 to 9, then you think of another one n2, perhaps one that you have not used very often, and finally say (n1+n2) mod 9 + 1. I think this strategy could make your selection more random . Perhaps someone could try it and report the results.

cubefox 11 minutes ago

Similar idea: https://aaronsonoracle.com/

malfist 2 hours ago

This is pretty interesting. I've found it's fun to throw off the algorithm. Use your warmup to repeatedly guess the same number, and then don't use it for a while.

andai an hour ago

https://xkcd.com/1210/

I always thought I was random, but now it's conclusive!

maidaman 4 hours ago

The first time I did badly. But the second time I got really far by deciding on a number instinctively and then picking something next to it. Maybe we instinctively pick similar numbers, but if we fight our instincts we end up with something truly random.

alwa 4 hours ago

I found it interesting when I felt my focus shift from the number-generating task to noticing (and responding to) the house’s guesses.

As soon as I noticed it repeating its guess, I had a good long run of adversarially avoiding that number… it’s kind of fun being on the machine side of the slot-machine-type racket!

Francute 2 hours ago

The house called 19 of your 190 scored numbers and only 2 people were more random than me.... Hmmm

akshitgaur2005 3 hours ago

Alternating and advancing from both ends seems to work, it calls n-1, and n+1 correctly if the previous guess was n, but got no calls in a sequence like - 1, 8, 3, 7, 4, 7, 1, 7, 3, 8, etc

kps 4 hours ago

I guess I've skewed the totals a little, but the site agrees that the digits of π are random.

vorticalbox 4 hours ago

I got to 2/30 then it just guessed 7 from 30-50.

Did I break it?

gaiagraphia 2 hours ago

I just pretended I'm playing piano to a megamix of tracks which popped into my head and did 'well'. Only 2 people more random. Typing though, think the site said that's "easier to win" on. Cba to speak 200 numbers out loud :/

Thanks, btw, actually enjoyed that. :)

nightpool 3 hours ago

"You spread your picks more evenly than a random draw would. Your most-used number made up 23% of your picks, where a random draw's busiest number gets about 23%."

??? huh?

foxhop 4 hours ago

blobrand dot com

floorsthelimit 4 hours ago

House called 0 of 50. Huh?