human randomness game

[gusl]

You know those Memory Championships?

I'd like to make a Randomness Championship, where people produce a long string of numbers/letters. People are really bad at producing random things, and tend to reuse the same kinds of patterns. Maybe it's because we can't behave as if we were memoryless.

Your performance would be measured by how much can be compressed. If your string can be compressed to less than 5% of the original size, then you've done a bad job. If you achieve higher than 90% incompressibility, that's probably better than most people.

The problem is that people could easily memorize a long random string, and so this would become really just another memorization test... unless you demand that they produce really, really long strings. Can you think of any other way to prevent this sort of cheating, besides brain-scans that would accuse any long-term memory retrieval?

I know I've already played a very simple binary guessing game, where the computer was "truly random" while learning my patterns. Obviously a game you can't expect to win.

Comments

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

You really really really need to find a woman...

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

ok. Can you help?

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

Put 5% into finding women that you do "thinking"...
This is not the same as thinking about women.

Depending on what type of person you are, the most important thing you might ever do is find the love of your life. Can you spend 5, 10 20% of your time doing this.

I took a month off and traveled the world...with the intent...I found my wife on the farthest archipelago in the world (this is true).

I started by making a list of all the things I wanted, and all the things I did not, then cross referenced that to places. For example, since I hate cold weather, I knew Iceland and Alaska were poor choices, so they were at the bottom of the list. I was pretty methodical.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Depending on what type of person you are, the most important thing you might ever do is find the love of your life. Can you spend 5, 10 20% of your time doing this.
I'm not really sure what I want. I've gotten pretty used to being single, and haven't had any life-altering relationships. I'm a pretty independent person anyway.
It would be nice to have someone to come home to, give me affection, (or someone to wash for me!), but mostly I just want to have fun, connect to people.

I have, in the past, spent 10% of my time on this. But mostly I don't bother because the yield has been so bad. Although it would probably be a bit better today (better dating sites, better me, etc).

But right now I don't even know how long I can stay in the Netherlands, as I need to find a sponsoring job. My goal now is to be financially independent... and a negative, but not unrelated, goal, is to remain in the 1st world. Living in Brazil sucks, and Brazil is the only place where I have a guaranteed legal right to live.

I'm working on some interesting ideas for educational software, but I think business is a whole different game... which I should learn how to play. I basically want to not have to worry about money. Besides, once you have money, visas follow...

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

..."or someone to wash for me!"

LOL.........er, there are things you really should do for yourself... :)

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Do you have any business advice though? What should I do if I have an idea for a really useful software product? Right now, it's not completely worked out yet, but later this month it could be.

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

Whoa...

You made a list of things, then used that to identify key places and then actually went on a physical trip to try to find the right woman?!

Wow!

With 31 years of being single I've heard plenty of advice, but I've never hear this one before.

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

I found one knock out woman.

However, I also really enjoyed many of the women I met in the same place.

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

Which has got me thinking... assuming that I had the time and money to go, where in the world would I go and why?

At least after a minute's thought I really haven't got a clue.

Though I'd have to say somewhere where people can speak English would be good. Although I can converse with people here in Italian it's just not the same as being able to say exactly what I want to say and how I want to say it in English.

But other than that I have no idea geographically where I would go.

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

Are you asking, or thinking out loud?

You have to really think hard about this. What do you like, and what do you hate, about people, cultures, etc.

All of this will end with chemistry. Everything else fails if you don't spark.

I actually really like all the women in my life, I just like the one I'm with now the best, and plan to be with her for the rest of my life.

Hey, I'm going to be speaking in Treviglio, Italy, a few kilometers from Milan, September 30, and Oct 1.

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

Just sort of thinking out loud I guess... I will seriously think about this question though.

Yeah I live about an hour from Milan. What are you speaking about? I assume you're talking in English?

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

Well, I will do my best to speak in English...gibberish is more likely.

I'm speaking on the x-Internet, as in what comes after XML HTML, etc. Faster Internet, etc.

Also presenting a big honking complex system I'm building...

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I started by making a list of all the things I wanted
...in a woman?

So if I like independent women, I should go to liberal-thinking places like Northern Europe or San Francisco?

Once in those places, how did you sift through the women? Did you tell people that you were looking for a wife? What about filtering the right personality types? What was your filter when you met your wife?

Btw, there are archipelagos farther away than Hawaii (unless your reference point is South Africa).

[brkvw.livejournal.com]

Q: So if I like independent women, I should go to liberal-thinking places like Northern Europe or San Francisco?
A: Exactly.

Q: Once in those places, how did you sift through the women? Did you tell people that you were looking for a wife? What about filtering the right personality types? What was your filter when you met your wife?
A: Yes, I told people, and my friends. Some of this is too big of a question for me to answer right now (for one thing it is a lot of text to write), also I was Wind surfing today, so I’m wiped out. Perhaps I will make it a focus of one my Journal posts. Then I can let my wife speak up.

Q: Btw, there are archipelagos farther away than Hawaii (unless your reference point is South Africa).
A: What if your reference point “is” Hawaii? :) Besides, when it comes to measuring this type of stuff, there is never an end to the types of rulers…

OK, so can you find a set (of small islands) that is farther from an international airport? Takes 5 hours to get from LA to Hawaii.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I will make it a focus of one my Journal posts.
looking forward to it.

Any archipelago in the Indian Ocean or the Indonesia side of the Pacific, or the Greek archipelagos.

[trufflesniffer.livejournal.com]

People are really bad at producing random things, and tend to reuse the same kinds of patterns

That's the reason there are large disparities in the numbers of national lottery winners from week to week, isn't it?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Interesting. So where the lottery results are "nice" will have a large number of winners?

I still find it a bit strange because you would expect very few lottery results to be really "nice".

Anyway, this raises the possibility that playing the lottery can be a positive EV game, if you bet on unpopular outcomes (playing randomly will be almost as good).

[trufflesniffer.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing that there's a more equal distribution of winners where lotteries use 'quick-pick' machines, which choose a set of numbers for customers to save them time, and do so in a more random fashion than they do themselves. This means, however, there's less chance of 'roll-overs', where lack of jackpot winners one week mean the winners funds carry over to the following week. Of course, rollovers make the lottery more appealing, so it's often not in the interest of the lottery manager to even out the distribution of numbers picked.

[trufflesniffer.livejournal.com]

I still find it a bit strange because you would expect very few lottery results to be really "nice".


If the lottery ever came up with the numbers 1-6 inclusive, I think it's estimated the number of winners would in the four-figures region.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

(1) what's the full range?
(2) how many numbers do you pick?
(3) how many numbers have to be right in order to win?

[trufflesniffer.livejournal.com]

1) 1-49
2) 6
3) none

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

(3) how do you win?

[trufflesniffer.livejournal.com]

Oh - 6 numbers.

I thought you meant, "do they have to be in the right order"!

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Another variant of my game would be to maximize information distance from the other strings, either by maximizing distance of nearest neighbour or by minimizing the sum of all neighbourhood functions (like a multi-dimensional kernel density estimation).

We could call this game "Informational Outlier".

[zarex.livejournal.com]

I wonder if someone could train themselves to crank out numbers from an MLS algorithm.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

MLS = "Moving Least Squares"?? In any case, you have the problem of getting random input...

Any algorithm that takes a small seed will by definition produce a sequence with small Kolmogorov Complexity. Good ones will produce strings that are hard to learn.

[zarex.livejournal.com]

MLS = maximal length sequences. They're excellent pseudorandom number generators. Obviously they repeat after some number related to seed size, but the algorithm is simple and effective.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

If you suspect that the user is using such an algorithm, how hard is it to figure out what they're doing?

It's interesting how randomness is a resource that computation alone cannot produce. You can only use your "secret weapon" once, he.

[zarex.livejournal.com]

If you're pretty sure that they're using such an algorithm (and sticking to it precisely) I suppose you would just have to run the algorithm with each seed, and see if the patterns match. This could take a while! I don't think there's a good way of back-calculating.

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

Why is compressibility a good measure for randomness? If I construct a random string of 10 digits by picking a random number 10 times, surely all sequences are equally unlikely to occur, including

4444444444
0123456789
4813805432


?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

We are using different meanings of randomness.
What I'm talking about is called "Kolmogorov Complexity".

If I construct a random string of 10 digits by picking a random number 10 times
This assumption is incompatible with the notion of Kolmogorov Complexity.

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

*looking up Kolmogorov Complexity in wikipedia*

Right, I get the general idea.

Still, is compressibility a good measure of performance in this case? Is it not possible to construct a short program that generates an arbitrarily long semi-random string which is hard to compress using a generic compression algorithm?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Is it not possible to construct a short program that generates an arbitrarily long semi-random string which is hard to compress using a generic compression algorithm?

Yes. This was zarex's idea.
But the seed has to be big enough to allow you to reuse it enough times without repeating a previous string.

Binary guessing game

[rainbrot.livejournal.com]

I played a binary guessing game on the Commodore 64, and found that I could fool it with certain very simple repeating patterns such as simple toggling (I assume because it would expect me to deviate from that pattern).

I've wanted to play with such a program again (and to show it to my family), but I haven't ever stumbled across one.