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).
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.
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".
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.
