Creepily reminiscent of this short story:<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a</a>
My solution was to generate random sentences in my head. I then iterate through the letters of each sentence, and if the letter is M or later in the alphabet, I select right. If the letter is before M in the alphabet I select left.
If you want to hack it, give it a binary de Bruijn sequence with alphabet size k=2. Since it looks to follow whichever pattern already exists, and de bruijn sequences minimize existing patterns, it always beats the game.<p>I used <a href="http://combos.org/bruijn" rel="nofollow">http://combos.org/bruijn</a> and pressed left for zero and right for one.<p>Using rule Grandmama creates close to a perfectly straight line up and to the right when you start from the first 1 in the sequence.<p>Try: 1001000101010011010000110010110110001110101110011110111111000000<p>where 1 is right and 0 is left.
The prediction is deterministic, so you can adapt to it and "beat" it every time. Though intuitively and without looking at the implementation, I obviously am not a good adversary: Lowest I reached was 43% after ~50 inputs, stopped at 47% after 103.<p>With just tapping "randomly", it was looking good until I got 52% at 250 inputs. From there on it went steep downward: 59% at 500 but 57% again at 1000 (I changed how I tapped at the 500 mark; else it would have declined even more).
At the heart of Bells inequality in physics is the assumption of free will, that the experimentalist is "free" to choose a detector setting.<p>Yet when faced with the task of actually generating random numbers, humans fail miserably. Some how the failure to generate random numbers isn't seen as a lack of free will by anyone.<p>But in the context of quantum physics, the experimenters "freedom" to do something most humans can't actually do is a given, and denying it is "super determinism" and anti science.<p>It's funny that physicist take the freedom of their random choices as a given when a simple experiment shows they don't have such freedom.
There is an example in Mathematica [1] that illustrates a similar point using Rock-Paper-Scissors game. It uses a very simple strategy to predict human opponent [2], but it appears to work well. (Although, at the moment the demonstration does not seem to be working at all (I tried it in Firefox and Chrome)).<p>[1]. <a href="https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/RockPaperScissorsWithAIPlayer/" rel="nofollow">https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/RockPaperScissorsWithAIPl...</a>
[2]. <a href="https://blog.wolfram.com/2014/01/20/how-to-win-at-rock-paper-scissors/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.wolfram.com/2014/01/20/how-to-win-at-rock-paper...</a>
This doesn’t really test randomness.<p>It appears that the guessing output is deterministic using your inputs as it’s inputs and you could figure out as many consecutive inputs you felt like to produce a specific outcome. For instance 6R1L3R inputs forces the game to “guess” wrong each time. It’s not guessing. This isn’t a random input, but it’s perfectly within a reasonable random distribution. Equally random is 10L, which the guesser will guess right each time.<p>Losing to the guesser doesn’t indicate a lack of random input, nor does guessing the opposite of the guesser indicate randomness.<p>We can’t really generate randomness. Only outcomes consistent with some distribution. It’s more of a philosophical point. If you made it it’s not random.
Tried it. Not being random, I earned some virtual money fast (iteration 39: I guessed left (wrong). You pressed right. My guesses are correct 28% of the time (overall).)
<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/n46fda7nmm0wi0e/20220911_112422.jpg?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/n46fda7nmm0wi0e/20220911_112422.jp...</a>
This is also kind of similar to the Newcomb Problem (read the Solution page for an excellent shott story)<p><a href="http://www.greylabyrinth.com/puzzle/puzzle014" rel="nofollow">http://www.greylabyrinth.com/puzzle/puzzle014</a>
The Pudding had a different take on eliciting and measuring randomness<p><a href="https://pudding.cool/2022/04/random/" rel="nofollow">https://pudding.cool/2022/04/random/</a>
I was apparently <i>extremely</i> random by counting in binary<p>left<p>right<p>right left<p>right right<p>right left left<p>right left right<p>right right left<p>right right right<p>right left left left<p>etc.