
Results for: Pick a number from 1 to 10 - solipsist
http://nfrom1to10.appspot.com/results/
======
alecperkins
I just updated the results page with a breakdown per-interface. There are more
metrics involved, but it'll be a little while before those get pulled
together. (The volume of data was unexpected, to say the least, so there
weren't any stats helpers in place prior to "launch".)

As for "revealing" the answers ahead of time, the whole question of "Pick a
number from 1 to 10" and the common result being 7 is well known (ish), so I'm
not too worried. Plus, the results aren't visible until you choose. PLUS,
there were over 80k votes before that first graph was available, and over 140k
by the time I put the per-interface breakdown up.

Hopefully, the volume will outweigh the people who try to manipulate it.
(There's also IP tracking, which will eventually be used to help filter out
anomalies, in addition to geolocating.)

I know, it's not exactly precise science, but it's a fun experiment that was
simple and kept the friction to a minimum. I'm not exactly trying to write a
paper. :)

Thanks to everyone who voted and spread the word, especially jedberg who
posted it to Reddit.

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ot
Can you do it again for 1 to 100? I'd like to improve my success probability
for this <http://xkcd.com/628/>

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ComSubVie
I guess 42 will be a spike in the results - but it would be interesting to
verify ;)

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ot
Are you implying than the average HNer or Redditer has a different bias wrt
the average girl?

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travisglines
It seems like publicizing some preliminary results of the study before the
study is complete would put the legitimacy of the final results very much so
at risk.

constructive criticism ... for science

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alecperkins
After 80k votes, it seemed prudent to give those asking "so what?" a response.

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travisglines
If (as I'm sure you do) you have the times along with the votes it would be
cool to see if there was actually a bias when comparing the before response
and after response datasets.

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shib71
There was something about "for SCIENCE!" that was irresistible.

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alecperkins
That bit of "flair" was added almost on a whim. I'm glad I did add it. I think
that helped the experiment get the attention it did, especially when it got
onto Reddit. It's funny how a simple factor can (probably) have such a big
impact.

Also, the unintentional "mystery" of not including any information about the
who or why on the site itself may have helped. I noticed many comments on HN
and Reddit that speculated about each, which no doubt increased the activity
profile. A little bit of personality goes a long way.

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bradly
Was this only posted to HN? If it was posted on other sites it would neat to
check the numbers against refers to see if HN is better at picking random
numbers than, say, Reddit.

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alecperkins
It ended up getting posted to Reddit, and has been making the rounds
elsewhere. (Over 100,000 uniques, holy cow!)

Unfortunately, the referrer wasn't tracked. I wasn't expecting to get enough
hits for it to matter. The expectation was for maybe 100 over a week. IP
addresses are tracked, so I'll eventually do a location breakdown.

~~~
Sukotto
Assuming you don't delete them, why not use your webserver logs to link
datestamp+IP address to referrer-url?

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spravin
The positioning of the dropdown clearly has a lot of influence on the results.
People are horrible random number generators! In this case, people are
unlikely to choose the ends (1/9) or the center (5) leading to a bimodal
distribution with two modes at 4 and 7.

~~~
kmiyer
Note however that different types of input systems were used. Refreshes show
the following different types:

    
    
      * A slider that need to be dragged to choose a value.
      * A list of numbers shown with highlighting on hover.
      * An input cursor that on hover changes to a list of numbers (within a curved border this time).
      * A text field (enclosed in a circular border), allowing manual input.
    

I'm quite interested in how results varied depending upon input type (possibly
more interesting than seeing how they vary by referrer).

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nixy
Well, why don't you have a look? :) <http://nfrom1to10.appspot.com/results/>

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klochner
I picked 3 because it's in the easiest number for me to strike (text box
version).

My mouse is typically in the middle of the screen, closest to the higher-
scoring numbers in the graphical version.

I'd like to see the results from the same test where you have to type the
number as a word for the textbox (e.g., three), and where the numbers aren't
laid out in the same numerical order for each user in the graphical version.

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vidyesh
Seems like people are so number centric and go for the universal lucky number.
Not sure why. How did this help? Were you able to do any behavior analysis
based on this small experiment?

I would suggest, go on a weekly result and keep tabs on result variation.

Try posting it on various/diverse communities. This might help to understand
alot about visitor behavior on various websites as you can track referring
websites too.

If possible graph the picks depending upon the referring websites. Or even a
graph based on region, tracking via IP should be easy.

For those who missed the Parent post, check here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2375149>

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AndyKelley
I picked 9. I feel good about doing my part to even out the distribution I
predicted :)

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DaniFong
I thought people would think 10 was the least random number, so I picked it,
:-)

I won! Yay.

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malandrew
can you do this again but with an arbitrary range. I'm curious what happens
when you don't have the lucky number effect (i.e. 7)

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burke
You didn't count my 11 :(

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AndyKelley
Did you actually use firebug and submit an 11 to the server? That would be
pretty funny.

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burke
Yep, sure did.

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orijing
The problem is that it didn't ask us to choose the numbers uniformly. Perhaps
I picked from a Gaussian distribution with mean 5 and a strict cut-off at 1
and 10.

I don't think anything can be concluded unless it asked for "choose uniformly
at random among the 10 numbers," if we want results robust against question
biasing.

~~~
Eliezer
"Choose randomly" is generally understood to mean "choose randomly from a
probability distribution containing as much entropy as possible given the
problem." I mean, I could choose from the probability distribution {0.001,
0.001, 0.998} but it's commonly understood that this isn't what's meant by the
word "random".

PS: I chose 2. Eat that, seveners!

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albertzeyer
Yay, I tried to guess and pick the number which I thought would probably be
picked the least amount of people.

10 was a good guess.

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philh
The results for 'select' seem strange. That's the only place where random
specified/not makes much difference. It also indicates that a lot more people
picked numbers under 'select/specified' than any other condition.

Have you checked your logs for possible vote stuffing?

~~~
alecperkins
Not yet, though IP addresses are one of the metrics for each vote. I'm still
working on efficient ways of going through everything.

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adleberg
Is it wise to publish updated results while the data is still being gathered?
Random selection should be blind and independent and its quite possible people
may change their vote to favor an 'unpopular' number or vice versa.

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kipwork
I think that the reason that 7 is so high is because it is commonly believed
that 3 will is the first one you think of. As a result people choose to pick
something higher, hence 4 and 7 being the top two.

~~~
archangel_one
I thought it was commonly believed that 7 is the most often picked - I've seen
a "magic" trick based around that before.

Sort of looks to me like people avoid the extremes and also 5 (possibly
because it's "right in the middle" and so perceived as "less random"?).

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chromejs10
I'm surprised the number 1 wasn't higher up because of the slider (since it
defaults to 1). I guess people aren't as lazy as I thought they were and
actually took the effort to move the slider :P

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davidk0101
I don't get it. How is the selector relevant to what people choose? You might
as well have put a different colored rabbit somewhere on the page and measured
responses that way.

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egypturnash
I'm getting nothing but "1800".

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alecperkins
Momentary stupidity on my part. I told it to cache the expire time instead of
the actual value. Oops. Go figure, it was the _one time_ I think "Eh, this is
a small change. I don't need to go to a testing version first."

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adolgert
Science has error bars.

~~~
alecperkins
Science takes time ;)

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nazgulnarsil
contrarian pride for 1 or 10.

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Flam
Glorious #2 Master Race.

