[7930] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: human failings question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Honig)
Thu Oct 5 12:57:10 2000
Message-Id: <3.0.6.32.20001005092356.007dc840@pop.sprynet.com>
Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 09:23:56 -0700
To: "Nina H. Fefferman" <feferman@Math.Princeton.EDU>, coderpunks@toad.com
From: David Honig <honig@sprynet.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0010032103510.28648-100000@Math.Princeton.ED
U>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
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)
