
A videogame that powers quantum entanglement experiments - kawera
https://www.wired.com/story/this-random-video-game-powers-quantum-entanglement-experiments/
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bmking
Obtaining randomness through this process sounds very strange to me. Is there
not a better way to get randomness? Random.org claims to use athmospheric
noise to generate "true" randomness. Without knowing much of the game it is
normally considered impossible for people to generate true random sequences,
as they would underrepresent extreme outliers (like the sequence 0000) and
overrepresent patterns that "look" random (like 1010).

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schuetze
Under non-competitive circumstances this is true. However people are actually
very adept at generating nearly perfectly random choices in competitive games.
There is evolutionary pressure to produce randomness, because if you are
predictable in a game, you will lose.

Citation:
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089360800...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608006001638)

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leephillips
The _Wired_ article doesn't make clear the reason for using humans rather than
a mechanical generator of randomness, hence several commenters here are,
understandably, questioning this. Why not use a chaotic physical system
instead? Because that would involve assumptions about the behavior of the
chaotic system. A way to eliminate these assumptions is to add "free will".

Original paper:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0085-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0085-3)

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taneq
Aren't humans a pretty terrible source of randomness? And _especially_ if
they're being asked to solve some kind of problem and their inputs are being
used as "random"? I would expect the results to be nigh useless especially if
you're trying to find some kind of correlation between different users'
inputs.

I don't claim to fully grok quantum physics but what little I do know of it
says this is not related to it.

