Oscar_Cunningham comments on Rationality Quotes April 2013 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Vaniver 08 April 2013 02:00AM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 11 April 2013 09:13:10AM *  54 points [-]

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."

-- Scott Aaronson

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 11 April 2013 11:27:21PM 16 points [-]

My bet is that the student had many digits of pi memorised and just used their parity.