Show HN: How random are you?

> 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.”

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

    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.

So I don't know if this result is comparable to the one from the study.

My results were:

The house called 10 of your 87 scored numbers: 11%.

Blind guessing would average about 9.7 of them (11%).

Only 5 of the 206 people in a psychology study were more random than you. The house found you extremely hard to read.

"Over here we have our random number generator."

https://web.archive.org/web/20230305130159im_/https://assets...

I did a PhD in a stochastic-related field though, so I know about some “tricks” (in that most humans are too random and eg. dont sample long running sequences)

It was a very interesting read, and it explained a really "simple" strategy which I found very memorable: build 3 strings representing "all previous moves + one of the 3 possible next moves", run a text compression on them, pick the move that yielded the smallest compressed result. That's the one where the compression algorithm identified the strongest pattern.

I found it really smart, instead of modelling the game it went one step higher in abstraction and works directly at the level of pure pattern recognition.

That keeps coming back to mind when thinking about things like randomness, the "bitter lesson" and LLMs.

Blind guessing would average about 12.9 of them (11%).

Only 2 of the 206 people in a psychology study were more random than you. The house found you extremely hard to read.

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

Also, in part because of this project, I got to go from being unemployed in my hometown in the South to working in SF on some pretty neat projects. It's a good memory.

[0] https://www.humanrandomness.com/

> Blind guessing would average about 3.0 of them (11%).

Admittedly I gave up before the 30 threshold but I think I did well enough at "beating the house"

Edit: tried again, 14/118, which is 12%. Maybe it's because I'm typing, and that's easier to do that speaking up.

Nice!

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!

I started just lagging the guesses of the machine, and it never seemed to catch on.

I tried it. Several 9s later, it figured me out.

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

Did I break it?

Not familiar with the sota if someone can chime in.

Thanks, btw, actually enjoyed that. :)

??? huh?