News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by thombles on Sunday May 01, 2022 @03:47AM (#31223000)
I understood my task as convincing another _human_ that it was randomly generated. Since N was low for each of the tasks, I was deliberate about sometimes having repeated values, and not ensuring that every option was picked an equal number of times, since that looks suspiciously algorithmic. Apparently I'm over 60.
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by indecisive_user on Sunday May 01, 2022 @04:30AM (#31223187)
As I understood it, their entire point is that younger people are not better at generating random sequences than older people, so guessing someone's age based on their complexity (randomness) score is completely unreliable.

Towards the bottom of the page they said they've only guessed age correctly 51% of the time, which lines up with there being no correlation between age and ability to generate random sequences

Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by thombles on Sunday May 01, 2022 @05:54AM (#31223591)
My point isn't the age result that I mentioned. (I believe their claim that it's bogus.) It's that the instruction to click "as randomly as possible" is ambiguous so at best they're measuring an average of the behaviours they think they are.
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by Danieru on Sunday May 01, 2022 @06:24AM (#31223744)
Those are the instructions from the original survey. Those if destructions being under defined, yes that is part of thr entire point.
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by dtech on Sunday May 01, 2022 @06:41AM (#31223847)
They are not, these are the instructions from the reproduction

> Tap a sequence of 10 dice rolls. Make it look as random as possible; another person should not be able to tell if you made it up or if it was from real dice rolls.

And this is the excerpt from the study they mention

> Click on a number between one and six as randomly as possible to produce the kind of sequence you'd get if you really rolled a die [...]

I made the same mistake as thombles, the new instructions make it sound like the objective is to trick a human. The original clearly states the objective is to be random.

They are not the same objective, as humans are terrible at recognizing randomness.

Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by ascar on Sunday May 01, 2022 @07:30AM (#31224125)
The [...] in your quote reads:

> so that if another person is shown your sequence of digits from 1 to 6, he/she should not be able to tell whether these numbers were produced by a real die or just “made up” by somebody.

I have a really hard time rationalizing why you would leave that part out of your quote and drew the conclusion you did. The original task was clearly also about creating patterns that a human would recognize as random.

Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by fweimer on Sunday May 01, 2022 @07:22AM (#31224081)
Indeed. This is very odd for a study designed as a reproduction of a different study. Why use different prompts?
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by CipherThrowaway on Sunday May 01, 2022 @04:24AM (#31223159)
Picking evenly seems to consistently produce higher "randomness" scores than picking unevenly or using an RNG. I wonder how this algorithm would rank random sequences vs shuffled linear sequences.

The fundamental issue with a randomness metric for sequences is that an idealized independent generator will under-perform vs a constrained generator that excludes low scoring sequences.

Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by telesilla on Sunday May 01, 2022 @04:09AM (#31223090)
I got the same answer as you, over 60, the first time as I was also very deliberate then went back and did it again like a 3 year old, jabbed anywhere and got a higher random result. Maybe there is something to the study?
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by afro88 on Sunday May 01, 2022 @03:50AM (#31223011)
Same reasoning here, and same result.
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by guywhocodes on Sunday May 01, 2022 @03:55AM (#31223028)
My age was guessed as over 60 as a result of this, which I guess is in line with their assumptions but maybe not for the right reason
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by thomasguide on Sunday May 01, 2022 @04:00AM (#31223050)
Same here.
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by IshKebab on Sunday May 01, 2022 @06:30AM (#31223781)
The entire point of this is that their age estimate is totally random.
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by Xplune13 on Sunday May 01, 2022 @05:35AM (#31223496)
Exactly, and I guess my days are numbered.
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by Freeboots on Sunday May 01, 2022 @04:31AM (#31223198)
I also repeated a lot, and left out options, etc. It rated me as more random than 84% and under 60 shrug
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by jokethrowaway on Sunday May 01, 2022 @05:35AM (#31223494)
Same reasoning and I got under 60, more random than 74% of the responses.
Re:We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us repr... by lqet on Sunday May 01, 2022 @05:08AM (#31223378)
Dito.