Inconsistency, though annoying, is a major driving force for learning and creativity.
Along these lines I was reading an old research paper about subjective notions of randomness a few weeks back (sorry I don't have a reference). It seems back in the 30's, a radio station sponsored a series of experiments in ESP in which someone at the station would attempt to mentally broadcast to the listening audience a random number from 0 to 9. The audience then wrote to the station with their mental impressions of the random numbers. Their votes were tabulated. This experiment was repeated numerous times. The experiment failed -- no correlation was found to support the ESP hypothesis.
So these other researchers used the data to analyze the subjective meaning of 'random number'. As it turned out, the number 7 was predicted about twice as often as any other number. The data was statistically significant with n something like 1800. From this one can infer that the typical human mind regards the number 7 as the 'most random' digit.
These researchers posited a theory to explain the human penchant for 7 as most random (it was not clear if the theory was ad hoc or not, but I think it's interesting regardless):
According to the theory, the numbers 2, 4, 6 and 8 are multiples of 2, which one might say makes them less random than 7 which is not a multiple of any other digit. 0 and 9 are endpoints on the 0-9 scale, which also makes them less random than 7. The number 5 is in the middle, which is non-random, etc. It seems that less can be said about 7 than about any other digit, and that the human mind considers this to be evidence that 7 is the most random.
These considerations may not be exactly rational but apparently the human mind sees them as rational at some unconscious level.
One might ask what this means in terms of AGI. Should an AGI also regard 7 as about twice as random as any other digit? Or would that be irrational and inconsistent with probability theory? I would suppose little considerations like these would make the difference between 'robot-like' and 'human-like'...
-gts ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
