News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction. Parent comment

Re:The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction by inlined on Thursday July 18, 2019 @01:28AM (#20466983)
Randomness of rewards has been repeatedly shown to increase duration spent with skinner boxes. There seems to be a magic middle spot where the small rewards are frequent enough to avoid disillusionment and the big rewards are infrequent & random enough to feed addiction
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction by madog on Thursday July 18, 2019 @09:30AM (#20469546)
It's called a variable ratio reward schedule [1]. It's at play in slot machines for example. Very effective at getting rapid and persistent responses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Gambling_%E2%80%...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction by taneq on Thursday July 18, 2019 @08:37PM (#20475316)
Huh, I've always heard "intermittent reinforcement" used to mean this, rather than just any not-every-time reinforcement. Thanks!
[ Parent | on HN ]