At 9:23 AM -0700 10/5/2000, David Honig wrote:
>At 09:07 PM 10/3/00 -0400, Nina H. Fefferman wrote:
>>
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Does anyone know where (if at all) I can find statistics for the
>>predictable strings humans tend to produce when asked to create a
>>"random" sequence of zeros and ones? Maybe cognitive science papers?
>> Has anyone seen these?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Nina Fefferman
>
>I have no specific ref in mind, but I do remember that humans
>find long runs (e.g., 01011000000110) unrandom, when asked to
>pick one excerpt vs. another. There was a
>recent paper on the perception of 'lucky streaks' in basketball,
>which unearthed their superstitious nature (ie an artifact of learning
>algorithms, like randomly-reinforced pigeons' "superstitions").
>So come to think of it, there are more papers on (mis)perceiving randomness
>than on (mis)generating it.
>
>Here's an interesting question: could you train someone to give
>more random sequences by merely giving them an entropy-measure as
>feedback? (Hmm, one could write a program which ran this experiment on
>human subjects)
>
Many years ago I saw a demonstration of the Apollo guidance computer
that included a 0/1 guessing game. You'd pick 0 or 1, the computer
would predict your answer (it helped to have someone else
supervising). Then your pick would be entered on the display/keyboard
assembly. The computer kept score and would typically be right about
65% of the time. Once while playing it, I decided to cheat by
flipping a coin. I was chagrined by what I thought was a long string
of "Heads," but the computer's score quickly dropped to about 50%.
Arnold Reinhold
