

Can you fool a computer at generating random numbers? - squeakynick
http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/january12013/index.html

======
DanBC
Mildly interesting - but determining if a sequence of maybe random numbers
actually is random is hard.

I'd like to see people talking about the DieHard tests, and potential problems
with it. Or about the needs for different types of randomness for different
applications - modelling requires large quantities of random numbers but needs
to be able to recreate the same sequence later. That would be very bad for
cryptography. Games need unpredictability, but true randomness isn't great.
Music shuffle systems are often made less random to prevent jarring changes.

------
JoshTko
Blog got it wrong for the real coin and my guesses.

~~~
hamburglar
me too

~~~
dexter313
same here

------
revelation
I can't tell, they both look totally random to me! You stumped me!

Spooky huh?

\--

Am I wrong in thinking that this will only work with at best a random coin
flip precision? Not to mention that the few flips people will be willing to
make means you lack any significant amount of data to make such a statement.

~~~
hdra
the idea is that we human sucks at generating random number. When we try to
generate a random number, we tend to overthink on how to make it random, and
ended up exhibiting a certain pattern (such as evenly spaced data) that we
think "random" numbers should have. I think his program tries to identify the
one with said pattern, and classify the data with relatively even distribution
as the one you thought up, so the point the articles is more about random
number rather than correctly guessing what you did.

The blog has a lot interesting articles on data analysis though, I think I
will be spending quite some time going through them. :)

edit: I didn't miss any sarcasm, did i?

------
Sniffnoy
This seems to link to the result page with no data; the actual starting page
seems to be at <http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/january12013/>

~~~
squeakynick
Ooops, yes, sorry. You pasted the correct link.

------
hdra
didn't have a coin with me to try it out, but just found new blog to add to my
rss feed... :)

