Show HN: How Random Are You?

This is a nice spin on the Aaronson oracle:

> 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 know pi to 100 decimal places and so that was pretty easy to cheat it

Rather than attempt to be random, knowing that I'm not, I wanted to see how well it can predict Math.random:

    setInterval(() => {
      const num = Math.round(Math.random() * 10);
      const ball = document.querySelector(`.typed-pad .ball-${num}`);
      if (ball) {
        ball.click();
      }
    }, 1000);

    The house's record

    The house called 18 of your 190 scored numbers: 9%.

    Blind guessing would average about 21.1 of them (11%).

    Only 1 of the 206 people in a psychology study was more random than you. The house found you extremely hard to read.

Is anyone sufficiently paranoid that their first thought was, "Are you going to train a model on my voice?"

(Yes, I saw the "type the numbers" option.)

This is pretty interesting. I've found it's fun to throw off the algorithm. Use your warmup to repeatedly guess the same number, and then don't use it for a while.

What about the following strategy? You first think of a random integer n1 from 1 to 9, then you think of another one n2, perhaps one that you have not used very often, and finally say (n1+n2) mod 9 + 1. I think this strategy could make your selection more random . Perhaps someone could try it and report the results.

The house called 19 of your 190 scored numbers and only 2 people were more random than me.... Hmmm

The first time I did badly. But the second time I got really far by deciding on a number instinctively and then picking something next to it. Maybe we instinctively pick similar numbers, but if we fight our instincts we end up with something truly random.

Alternating and advancing from both ends seems to work, it calls n-1, and n+1 correctly if the previous guess was n, but got no calls in a sequence like - 1, 8, 3, 7, 4, 7, 1, 7, 3, 8, etc

I found it interesting when I felt my focus shift from the number-generating task to noticing (and responding to) the house’s guesses.

As soon as I noticed it repeating its guess, I had a good long run of adversarially avoiding that number… it’s kind of fun being on the machine side of the slot-machine-type racket!

I guess I've skewed the totals a little, but the site agrees that the digits of π are random.

I got to 2/30 then it just guessed 7 from 30-50.

Did I break it?

I just pretended I'm playing piano to a megamix of tracks which popped into my head and did 'well'. Only 2 people more random. Typing though, think the site said that's "easier to win" on. Cba to speak 200 numbers out loud :/

Thanks, btw, actually enjoyed that. :)

"You spread your picks more evenly than a random draw would. Your most-used number made up 23% of your picks, where a random draw's busiest number gets about 23%."

??? huh?

blobrand dot com

House called 0 of 50. Huh?