It was my impression that humans are bad at random (number) generation. Tell a person to arrange stars on a black canvas randomly, and they’ll space them out more or less equidistantly and uniformly. If asked to generate a sequence of coin flips, we would avoid longer runs of the same coin face, which do happen with real coins.
The scientific consensus agrees. Here’s a study where participants are asked to generate a sequence of 300 digits from 1 to 9. The researches successfully predict the next digit with a 27% chance (a truly random sequence would indicate an 11% chance). Scott Aaronson designed a simple program that predicts which of two keys the user will press next with a 70% chance on average.
On the other hand, I’ve seen a number of informal online polls (e.g. on reddit and twitter) where the respondents demonstrate an ability to randomly sort themselves into two groups with a very high degree of accuracy. See here and here, though I’ve seen a ton of these with various ratios. I’ve never seen it not work. It does break down for 1-99, but that seems reasonable to me.
The question is, do you know of any research into this phenomenon or do you have a good explanation for it?
Note that the ability is there in some contexts but not in others. An RNG exists within us, but our access to it is sometimes blocked. I’ve seen other examples of this in psychology so it doesn’t weird me out as much as it used to, but I still wanna point it out.
If this seems like a queer phenomenon to fixate on, know that an RNG is useful in many contexts. It’s necessary for strong/optimal strategies in certain games (poker, rock paper scissors) and game theoretic scenarios. It’s useful for coordination without communication. The best known algorithms for some problems are probabilistic.
[Question] Inaccessible finely tuned RNG in humans?
It was my impression that humans are bad at random (number) generation. Tell a person to arrange stars on a black canvas randomly, and they’ll space them out more or less equidistantly and uniformly. If asked to generate a sequence of coin flips, we would avoid longer runs of the same coin face, which do happen with real coins.
The scientific consensus agrees. Here’s a study where participants are asked to generate a sequence of 300 digits from 1 to 9. The researches successfully predict the next digit with a 27% chance (a truly random sequence would indicate an 11% chance). Scott Aaronson designed a simple program that predicts which of two keys the user will press next with a 70% chance on average.
On the other hand, I’ve seen a number of informal online polls (e.g. on reddit and twitter) where the respondents demonstrate an ability to randomly sort themselves into two groups with a very high degree of accuracy. See here and here, though I’ve seen a ton of these with various ratios. I’ve never seen it not work. It does break down for 1-99, but that seems reasonable to me.
The question is, do you know of any research into this phenomenon or do you have a good explanation for it?
Note that the ability is there in some contexts but not in others. An RNG exists within us, but our access to it is sometimes blocked. I’ve seen other examples of this in psychology so it doesn’t weird me out as much as it used to, but I still wanna point it out.
If this seems like a queer phenomenon to fixate on, know that an RNG is useful in many contexts. It’s necessary for strong/optimal strategies in certain games (poker, rock paper scissors) and game theoretic scenarios. It’s useful for coordination without communication. The best known algorithms for some problems are probabilistic.
And while I have your attention: https://www.strawpoll.me/21064106