I can’t resist sharing this quote from Scott’s blog post, I loved it the first time I read it all those years ago in Lecture 18 of his legendary Quantum Computing Since Democritus series, the whole lecture (series really) is just a fun romp:
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.”
I wonder if he’d just memorised the first couple dozen digits of something like Chaitin’s constant or e or pi like you or whatever and just started somewhere in the middle of his memorised substring, that’s what I’d’ve done.
I wonder if he’d just memorised the first couple dozen digits of something like Chaitin’s constant or e or pi like you or whatever and just started somewhere in the middle of his memorised substri
Yeah that’s what I suggested people try if they want a near-perfect external source of randomness.
I can’t resist sharing this quote from Scott’s blog post, I loved it the first time I read it all those years ago in Lecture 18 of his legendary Quantum Computing Since Democritus series, the whole lecture (series really) is just a fun romp:
I wonder if he’d just memorised the first couple dozen digits of something like Chaitin’s constant or e or pi like you or whatever and just started somewhere in the middle of his memorised substring, that’s what I’d’ve done.
Yeah that’s what I suggested people try if they want a near-perfect external source of randomness.
Yeah the “pi like you” was a reference to that passage.
oops! For some reason I brain-farted and thought it was a different constant I wasn’t familiar with.