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Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle (ischool.berkeley.edu)
271 points by ifelsehow on June 2, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 226 comments



This sequence gives a score of 0:

f f f f f f d f f f f f f d d f f f f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d f f f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d f d f d f f f d f f d f f f f f f d d d d d d f d d d d f f d d d f d f d d d f f f d d f d d f d f f d d f f d f d d f f f f d


Explain?


The carefully crafted (non-random) sequence above tries to fake out the script and succeeds every time. It reveals the script's own predictability, and why you shouldn't rely on it too much as a yardstick for testing your brain's psuedo-randomness.


You can generate a sequence like this if you can see what the program thinks your next input will be, and choosing different.

It's fairly easy to debug/modify the javascript to do this


I didn't press anything because it was a free will test. The instructions tried to get me to press buttons and I refused. Free will established.


Wait, you clicked the link?


I also decided not to answer your question.


I was destined to create this reply.


It was fate that lead me to read your reply.


Clever girl. But you rely on the "keyhole property" that loses considerable information about you as a physical entity as make this joke. You would not be able to hide your micro-expressions, or the variability of your typing, from a properly placed sensor.


Clever counterpoint. :)


Got it to 0.5991561181434598 after a while (totally random would be "0.5").

Not sure how "free will" comes into play, if there was indeed free will, I could have freely decided to only press one, and the Oracle would have had close to 100% certainty.

Rather, what it measures is randomness or predictability, which is not the same thing as free will (especially "after the fact", e.g. after the choice is made).


Right. It tries to measure how random your brain's PRNG is, which has nothing to do with free will. A simple computer has no free will at all, but after being instructed to type randomly, it will score close to 0.5 without fail.

The "free will" quote comes from a Berkley quantum computing student, who chose keys as independently of pattern as he could [1], and this seems to take it out of context. It might make sense to retitle this submission to something marginally less clickbaity, like "test how predictable you are."

[1] https://github.com/elsehow/aaronson-oracle


To most people, "how predictable you are" and "whether you have free will" are almost the same question.


Well, those people are wrong I'd say.

Being quite unpredictable just means that you do a lot of random things -- but says nothing about how you came to will them.

If someone, for example, was threatened and ordered to follow for years what a program with millions of suggestions told him to do, he would be very unpredictable, but totally without free will.

And the inverse: one could choose to do the same routine all his life, and thus be very predictable, but it would still be his free choice.


Fair enough, but was only speaking to the "clickbait" charge, by arguing that it's not misleading to characterize this as test of "free will" in the typical usage of the term.

But yeah, it's not the same as being unpredictable: that would look like seizures, not "gosh which ice cream flavor will he pick?:


Those people are wrong. Other commenters dealt with that below.

RE free will itself, I'm thinking it has more to do with metacognition and general complexity of thoughts. People may have free will, but they're running the same "free will algorithm" - give them the same inputs, and most of the time you'll get the same outputs. A lot of people don't want to consciously accept that, but it's a fact. It's e.g. why economics works at all - because people are predictable at scale.

But when do we most often reference the concept of "free will" in practice? In evaluating degree of responsibility for decisions. "You did X, which was the most obvious and beneficial in the short-term option, but you could've done Y or Z, which would be better - therefore you will suffer consequences". Or, "I won't do X even though the situation tries to manipulate me into doing it; I notice I'm being manipulated so I'll do Y instead". Scenarios like these refer to the human ability of a) non-greedy optimization (long-term planning), and b) being able to go meta many levels up, to notice their own patterns of thoughts and use them as an input to the thinking process. A feedback loop over metacognition if you don't mind.

This is still all pretty deterministic. The apparent randomness - I think - comes from the fact that a) two people never have perfectly the same set of inputs, because the internal state is dependent on one's life history, and b) in some cases slight variations in those inputs cause huge variations in outputs (butterfly/hurricane and all that). In a way, the main connection between "free will" and randomness may be just that a human doesn't have capability to perfectly predict the thought process of another human. We can do that to inanimate objects, we can do that to algorithms we write - at least in principle. But we know that other humans will always suprise us (at least because they can notice we're trying to predict them and start acting random to mess with us).


> "give them the same inputs, and most of the time you'll get the same outputs.... people are predictable at scale."

That's not quite how economics work. It's more like, outputs from a given set of inputs can be characterized in a statistical way at scale (which is subtly different from saying that individuals are predictable at scale.) It's not that every person will choose to buy pizza if it's $11.99 but not if it's $12.00, but instead that if you offer pizza for $11.99 you'll generally get between X and Y sales per day, and if you increase that to $12.00 you can expect to lose about Z sales, and you can mess with that curve to try to maximize revenues or whatever.

I would say that what makes "free will" an interesting concept is that it's about how one chooses to prioritize different values -- how they express meaning by their choices. In the sense of a "free will algorithm", it's how you choose to weight different factors in your algorithm. How do you weight comfort, pleasure, stimulation, challenge, avoidance of pain, etc.? How do you weight those things for others? In practical usage, we talk about "free will" when someone makes a choice that surprises us, showing that their value system or their evaluation matrix is different from ours.


If I had to guess? I'd say most people believe they are capable of choosing their actions - but they would also admit to a reasonably predictable set of habits.


Yes, I think most people don't bring predictability into it at all. Free will is about the feeling of "I could do, or could have done, X instead of Y", but your search space only ever included X, Y, and Z. Just knowing your search space makes you highly predictable even if you maintain the freedom to choose inside that space. (And however we choose, it is not randomly, that would be terrible, but more chaotic in the same sense that weather has too many unknown inputs that we can't predict all the details we want to perfectly.)


Whether or not determinism and free will are compatible is a very intricate debate that your throwaway remark doesn't do justice to. Look up Compatibilism.


Also, Determinism (philosophy) != deterministic (computing)

The former is the metaphysical idea that all events are causally linked, a belief which we can never confirm or refute. The latter describes something's observable degree of predictability.

They're not related concepts at all. This demo has nothing to do with free will, Determinism, or Compatibilism - but it's an interesting study in predictability.


Is the distinction roughly "causally determined" vs "logically determined" ?

If we are talking about an abstract computing device, and whether it is deterministic, we mean whether its next state is always uniquely logically determined by the current state, correct?

Hmm, if an abstract machine behaves in a way that is uniquely logically determined, but which is not computable, do we consider such machines to be deterministic? I would think so, but I am not sure. We would be unable to predict it, does that make it not deterministic(computing) ?


Again, I was only speaking to the issue of whether it's misleading/clickbait to the average person, not whether they're really equal.


Scott Aaronson has a cool paper taking about the relationship between the two questions.

Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159


Did they predict that I'd wire the {d,f} input to a PRNG? Did they predict that I have a lot of digits of pi memorized, or that I could use the hex 'spigot' formula to generate digits of pi, then convert d=0, f=1 (or the inverse)?

Did they predict which method I'd wire it up with and the exact source of the program I'd use to do so?

I'm going to hazard a 'no', so it looks like I have free will.


You had free will anyway. More to the point, you used it to behave unpredictably.


The only way to assume that those are synonymous would be to ask if one can freely will themselves to be random. However, even that has more to do with aptitude and ability than free will. E.g. I can freely will myself to try and be an NBA player, but I'm bound by physical limitations. However, my inability to be an NBA player would not normally be considered a lacking of free will.


The "free will" bit is more of a joke than anything, based on a quote from Scot Aaronson's book (explained in the GitHub Readme):

> I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he “just used his free will.”


There's another Aaronson call-back: he's complained about how trivial results (like the core part of the Free Will Theorem) will get a lot more attention if you mention free will:

> I wrote a review of Steven Wolfram's book a while ago where I mentioned this, as a basic consequence of Bell's Theorem that ruled out the sort of deterministic model of physics that Wolfram was trying to construct. I didn't call my little result the Free Will Theorem, but now I've learned my lesson: if I want people to pay attention, I should be talking about free will!

http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html


if .5 is completely random, what does it mean that I got it down to 0.4781666666666667? I may have gotten it lower than that, but got tired of taking screenshots. Eventually I ended up back around .53


It means you were able to fake the algorithm out. Consider a very simple algorithm that guesses based on your previous two characters:

  df  d
  dd  d
  fd  f
  ff  f
This is presumably much simpler than what the page is doing, but will nonetheless work pretty well on humans by looking for alternations and long runs.

This algorithm is trivially defeated (chance of guessing 0) by the string

ffddffddffdd

Since that holds a pattern just long enough to get the algorithm to guess based on it and then switches.

For a little while, either intentionally or not, you must have been doing a more sophisticated version of this.

With perfect knowledge, it should be possible to get it down to 0.


if .5 is completely random, what does it mean that I got it down to 0.4781666666666667?...Eventually I ended up back around .53

It means you were temporarily a statistical outlier.


Any random result series has such "unlikely" occurrences -- you can get 100 6 in a row by throwing dice for example, it's just rare. It's the long term convergence that matters.


I think I might have missed the point of this. Is this just a predictability score - really simple one?


Yeah, I feel like randomness and "free will"-ness are pretty orthogonal. That said, I was able to keep the thing below a maximum of .56-ish without using any of the tricks others have suggested here, like picking an insignificant digit in the accuracy number and pressing 'f' or 'd' based on its value, or using the even/oddness of successive positions in π, or whatever.

So, apparently, my brain's PRNG is pretty random. But I still have absolutely fuck-all idea whether or not I have "free will".

Fun two-and-small-change minutes, though.


I got mine to hover around 58%. I was watching which sequences it was predicting and then changing them. That seems to mostly work.


This is silly. Enough people (especially self-reporting), a large percentage will be well below 50% (unless it really is an oracle). About as soon as I started, it quickly dropped into the 30's. Even after several minutes and hundreds or thousands of keystrokes, it hardly moved over 50%.


I got mine down to 0.31xxx. I did about a hundred strokes and it never went over 0.48.


Quickly got it down to 0.500001 or something, but now back to 0.54 :-(


I can consistently get 60% by drumming the keys with both index fingers, not consciously picking the values but still generating them myself.


I was at 53% after about 20 presses, and then by trying hard got it down to 47%.

Don't ask me what 'trying hard' means -- I don't know! :-)


You can use its own output against it. (Which means, ironically, it does not follow "know thyself", a maxim said to be from the Oracle at Delphi.)

Fixate on a number fairly late in the sequence (the millionths place seems to work well). If that number is 5-9, push 'f'. Otherwise, push 'd'. Keeps it pretty consistently around 0.5.


"To maximize your free will, press the key that the robot tells you to."


Right! Someone please get dang to retitle this submission, so we can all finally stop equating free will with unpredictability.


It's a joke. From the github page:

> In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he “just used his free will.”


If you just type 01101110010111011110001001..., you should evade any simple LZW-type compressor, as this string is (viewed as a radix expansion in binary) a normal number.


"I can do whatever I want! See, I do exactly what the n-th digit of pi says to!"


I for one freely obey our new robot overlords?


You got 0.5, but where's your free will now, human?


It means either both the poster and the bot have free will or neither of them do!

But seriously, the intuitive concept of free will, something like "unconstrained choice" leads to the idea that free will means simulating randomness - but once you're there, it looks more or less like nonsense - "acting randomly"


I think the intuitive concept of free will is more like "able to take meaningful actions" -- which means choices that express intent or desire. Sometimes your intent is to be unpredictable, to fool the algorithm. But sometimes your intent is to be consistent.


One could also invoke that free will and simply not play the game at all.


You're playing this game, every day with every website you go to, every store you visit, every app you use, every interaction you make. Unless you live a (probably less comfortable) life in a rural area. These types of techs for the most part make out lives better.


>make lives better By some sense of the word. I think we over-value convenience, which is all most of this tech really gives us.


A less efficient method I used was; press a key until the probability jumps up, then switch keys (probability will go down, mostly) until it goes up again. Rinse/repeat.


I tried that. It learns what you're doing pretty quickly.

I was doing better by just trying to continually break whatever pattern I had fallen into, and occasionally throwing in some long predictable patterns (i.e. all the same key) to simulate the low chance of a long predictable string occurring. That had me down in the ~.4 range for a while. (Edit: Down to 0.23529 this try)


When I was little (and had too much free time) I memorized many digits of some transcendental numbers. The only (semi)practical use I've found for that knowledge, is that I can use it as a reasonably good pseudorandom stream. If for some reason I have to choose things pseudorandomly. Pick an arbitrary starting point in pi, and press 'd' for even digits and 'f' for odd digits, I get around 0.49 accuracy with this oracle.


You don't need a transcendental number; simple counting has perfect entropy:

0 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 1000 1001 1010 1011 1100 1101 1110 1111 10000...

(Granted, that is a transcendental number -- the Champernowne constant for base 2 -- but there's no real need to think of it that way.)


This sequence seems to settle right around 50%:

  var simulateKeyPress = function(character) {
    var evt = document.createEvent("KeyboardEvent");
    evt.initKeyEvent ("keypress", true, true, window,
                      0, 0, 0, 0,
                      0, character.charCodeAt(0)) 
    document.body.dispatchEvent(evt);
  };
  
  var num = 0;
  var loop = function() {
    console.log(num);
    var binary = num.toString(2);
    num++;
    for(var i = 0, len = binary.length; i < len; i++) {
      simulateKeyPress(binary[i] == '0' ? 'd' : 'f');
    }
  };
  
  setInterval(loop, 100);


It might sound weird, but I actually found that more readable as three lines of code. :/


I wrote a program that counts but only appends the sequence if the binary sequence isn't already there.


> but only appends the sequence if the binary sequence isn't already there

Why?


Haha, I did the same thing! From memory:

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197969399375105

Now, the interesting question, how accurate is my recollection after all these years? Ack, one digit off!


If a transcendental number is imperfectly remembered, are its digits thereby less random?


More random, I'd say.


141592653589793238462643383279502884197969399375105... that 9 should be a 1, right?


Indeed.


Mm I did something similar, doesn't need memorization though: arbitrarily form sentences, go through the letters in order, and pick 'd' for a-m and 'f' for n-z. Of course there will be some patterns, but it's sufficient for this. And I think this strategy uses more free will :P


I imagined how I would have coded it and so I devised a system to get it down as low as possible. I ended up with 0.44 accuracy. Pure random would have been better :)


Well, that only shows that this oracle can be improved. It should be able to recognize that pattern from a well known transcendental number.


That might be a slippery slope though. Is a known random sequence less random than an original one? Should a randomness detector keep a database of all random sequence ever produced to give lower scores to known ones?


but what if the challenge was not 2 chars but 3 (d, e, f)?

pi (base 9) = 3.12418812407442788645177761731035828516545353462652301126321450283864034354163303086781327...


An idea I shared on "Can you behave randomly? (1998)" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753194) seems relevant here.

The keypresses I entered were not predictable by the Oracle. I generated the keypresses by first picking an arbitrary integer in [0,59]. I then (using simple mental arithmetic) used that integer to seed a PRNG by George Marsaglia [1] to generate a stream of pseudo-random decimal digits. For each digit, if it was in [0,7], then I took the 3-low order bits of its binary representation, in order from least significant to most significant bit (0=f, 1=d). If the digit was 8 or 9, I discarded it. The PRNG I used has period 59, and only 20% of the output digits would have to be discarded. Therefore one could use this approach to generate up to 141 pseudo-random bits.

[1] Marsaglia, George. "How to generate random number sequences (in your head)" https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sci.math/6BIYd0cafQo/Ucipn_5...)


I really like this crude PRNG algorithm. Now I also have a reason to learn the multiplication table. Or at least the sixths column.


Can't you invoke a simpler random generator? Let's say primes % 4 ?


Do you have any references on the statistical properties of the primes % 4 sequence? When converted to coin flips, primes % 4 fails the statistical randomness tests at http://faculty.rhodes.edu/wetzel/random/mainbody.html

See results at http://imgur.com/iaHBNNr ("Your nth attempt" is primes % 4, "Coin nth attempt" is the Marsaglia PRNG). Note that primes % 4 has too many runs, its prob(H given H) is too low, and its prob(H given T) is too high.


It was meant to be read a question, not statement ("are you aware of a simpler PRNG I could pull from the top of my head, using basic arithmetics?").

Maybe a collatz sequence?

You're right, apparently it's called Chebyshev's bias.


I'm not aware of a simpler PRNG. It took me quite a search to find Marsaglia's.


At first I was stuck at ~0.95 but I was just striking the keys really fast but then I concentrated and looked at the keys and really tried to feel which key I wanted to press and it worked. I was able to score lower ~0.4. I'm computationally irreducible for now.


Well, if your score is .4, a computer could predict you with .6 accuracy just by predicting what you will press and then guessing the opposite :)


but how does it know to use the opposite for him and not for other guesses? I make a similar mistake when I try to remember something by noting "it's not the choice I'm naturally inclined to choose, it's the other one". After I get used to using that heuristic, the correct choice becomes the one I'm naturally inclined to do, but then I have trouble remembering "is it the choice I'm inclined to do or the opposite". I've since ditched that heuristic when I realize I'm doing it because it is quite detrimental.


That's the trouble with game theory-like heuristics. To a layman like me it's unclear how many times do you want to recursively apply it.

The 2/3 of the average guess game is an interesting illustration where if you take the game theory approach and recursively apply it you'll end up with 0 all the time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average


I think this more just highlights the problem of trying to predict behavior when there are only two options.


Weird. When I tried to just "type random" without looking at the keys, it was routinely getting me around 75%. I tried looking at the keys as you described, and my score immediately dropped to around %50 and was even below %50 for a bit. Then it crept back up to around %60 when I started talking to a co-worker while typing.


There's been a number studies that showed that humans are bad at random number generation. e.g. "Humans cannot consciously generate random numbers sequences" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17888582


Humans are bad at random number generation, until you train them to do it. Randomness is a skill that can be learned like any other.


Do you have any resources on how to become better at randomness?


I don't, but if you are curious I know Allen Neuringer studied training random behavior in animals and humans via reinforcement.


No, but I've got some dice here.


Sure, but I'm curious why looking at the keys seems to matter.


I guess that goes back to the original premise of the experiment. That "free will" is unpredictable. And the way I thought about it is that for me to have a true inclination -- not to just do it "randomly" -- I'd have to look at the keys and feel something.


You went from incredible predictable to better than random? Wow, now that's impressive!


I was able to hang at around 0.5 by remembering something I'd read on HN about identifying non-random strings because they did too much alternating and not enough repeating.

Instead of trying to pick randomly between f and d, I picked numbers between 0 and 9, with an intentional bias toward lower numbers, and those would determine the length of the next sequence. So if I picked 4, 3, 7, 1, 3, 2, 2, 5, 0, 4 as my numbers, that would translate to

ddddfffdddddddfdddffddfffff[0=don't change]ffff.

I suspect a more sophisticated program would be able to pick apart my strategy, but it worked really well against this particular algorithm.


It got to 1 immediately and stayed at 1 no matter what I did. Either this is a very impressive future predicting machine or there's a bug.

.... Turns out it was because I was pressing the wrong buttons on my Dvorak layout keyboard!


This makes sense. The only reason you'd use Dvorak is if you had no free will!


I counted up from 0 in binary (excluding leading zeroes) and even with a completely predictable series, it only did slightly better than 50%. I was expecting more (that on-line game of 20 questions was freaky good).


The explanation of how it works says it uses 5-grams to predict the next bit, so if you use any sequence in which all 6-grams occur equally often, this won't be able to predict you at all.

Actually, an interesting challenge might be to construct a sequence that gives the Oracle as low a score as possible (is there a nicer simpler way to describe this than simulating the Oracle's code and always choosing what it doesn't expect?).


Always choose the one that makes a new 6-gram, or that makes a 6-gram with the fewest previous appearances?


Sure, is there an easy way to generate that algorithmically without maintaining an explicit history? Is there a well-known sequence with that property? Do Gray codes have it, for example?


You'd want a sequence that contains every 6-gram exactly once and ends with the same 5 digits as it starts with: such a sequence would be 2^6=64+5=69 bits long, and then you'd repeat the first 64 over and over. (Or just contains exactly once up to cycles.)

Some searching tells me this already has a name, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence

So yes, just take a De Bruijb sequence B(2,6) (algorithms in the link can generate them) and repeat it.


Nice!


Yep ... Grays code was my immediate thought too.


The Gray code turns out to work if you require the n-grams to be aligned to n-character boundaries. So if you interpreted "00001111" as containing only the two 4-grams "0000" and "1111", you're OK; but if you allow arbitrary alignments, so that "00001111" contains the 5 4-grams "0000", "0001", "0011", "0111", and "1111", the Gray code doesn't work.

For example, the 4-bit Gray code (under this interpretation) when concatenated into a single bitstream begins "00000001", which then contains the 4-grams "0000", "0000", "0000", "0000", "0001", so the predictor gains an advantage right at the outset. (I didn't check whether it then loses its advantage over time... that's an interesting question.)


Which 20 questions game?


I'm guessing this: http://en.akinator.com/


I have been having way too much fun with this, but it really goes off the rails sometimes. I am currently in a stream where the correct answer is "Ambrose Bunside". It asked me if my character has been dead for more than 100 years, then two questions later asked me if my character uses musical.ly. :/


If the answers to both were yes, your character might have been a vampire, animate mummy, ghost, or lich.


I feel like it sometimes just wastes questions near the end when it's already narrowed the possibilities down. Maybe that's even on purpose, for showy effect.

After all, it's pretty impressive when it appears to correctly get Frank Sinatra out of "does your character play video games for a living."


I'm guessing http://www.20q.net/, the original pretty impressive online 20 Questions game.

(They were using the grating slogan "the neural net on the Internet" when neural nets were the pariah of AI. It's kind of amazing.)


I got it down to 0.51-something by simply switching keys iff the measure increased. Ironic, since I was exhibiting no "free will" by following that rule :)


I did that too and it worked for a short while, but then started increasing without bound. I wish it would list the record as you go.


1.0 is a fixpoint of that strategy! Since increasing values cause you to switch keys, and continually switching keys is perfectly predictable.


Well, it's less about your 'free will' and more about one's inability to generate a random number.

I'm not going to take the time to test it, but if you flipped a coin before each key press, this algorithm would eventually get to 50% accuracy. But in the short term it would probably be <50%, because it assumes it won't actually get random input.


Actually, if a player is flipping a coin, it is literally impossible to design an algorithm that has expectation other than 50%. Even in the short term, it cannot have an expectation that's <50%.


Sklansky tells in the Theory of Poker that you need to be unpredictable when deciding whether to call a possible bluff, and "tune" it to the cards that are known.

So you may need to make a yes-no decision where you decide on yes about 65% of the time, when you consider lots of those decisions.

His solution? Glance at your watch. Divide the current minute into proportionate parts. See in which part the seconds hand is standing.


  dd if=/dev/urandom count=1024 bs=1 | xxd -b
Then I hit "d" for 1, "f" for 0 as I read through the bytes of output. It stuck around 0.5 the whole way, which is what I expected.


Ok, so it works. Did you try to input the letters you chose by yourself?


Yeah, I was also somewhere around 0.5-0.6 after a minute or so, then got the idea to try truly random numbers


I wrote a timer in the developers console that logged either f or d depending on whether Math.random() was above or below 0.5 every second, typing the sequence that was being logged, the oracle consistently scored around ~0.4.


Being predictable does not mean you have no free will.

I mean, ever heard of compatibilism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism


If anything, this demo shows:

1. Unpredictability is possible even when the user doesn't have any choice about input (type keys based on a PRNG)

2. Predictability is possible even when the user can choose from both available options (human user)

It's an interesting study in our ability to be random, but it doesn't tell us anything about the macro-level philosophical concepts of determinism or free will. Compatibilism is not relevant to this demo.


From a physical point of view, free will doesn't make sense. Laws are deterministic at macro level and contain some randomness at the lower level. Neither are free will.

Also, there is a huge assumption there - the assumption that there is a "self" that can have this free will. There is no self, just a stream of experiences and actions. The "self" is an intuitive concept, a reification that is useful in social dealings. Taking it from the social context and putting it in the realm of physics could be just a sleight of language - it cannot be the same concept in both domains, because the two domains are so far off. And trying to formally define a self in physics is impossible for us.


From a physical point of view, what are experiences?


Well, no, I guess not if you switch over to some weak definition of free will.


"Press the 'f' and 'd' keys randomly. As randomly as you can. I'll try to predict which key you'll press next. 0.4893617021276598 A rolling mean of my accuracy in predicting what key you'll press."

So does that mean it's not able to predict with more than 50% accuracy?


Um. This is a scientific "psychic-o-meter".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant


0.49 -- for me it helped to close my eyes and picture a random bit stream (0=d, 1=f) rather than try to force my hands to "act randomly"


What happens if i open the source code for this, run it in node, get the probability of guessing f or d, and then guess the one that's lower?

This is like showing someone an elaborate mirror, and saying, "See? My copy of you does exactly what you're doing to do! You don't have free will!"

All you have to do is put another mirror in the middle and show them that it doesn't work as they claim.


Sure, there are ways to "break" it. The point here is to demonstrate that if you try to intuitively go for manual "non-randomness", you won't be as random as you think, sometimes surprisingly off from ~50%.

Actually the quickest way I found to "break" it and hover at ~50% is to simply aim for the dead space between the "F" and "D" keys. If it was using non-adjacent keys like "F" and "J" instead it would be better for its purpose. "Q" and "P" might work even better since it would mostly force you to use 2 hands, making it much harder to score close to 50%.


You are onto something here. This reminds me of various hierarchies of logic(Bertrand Russell's arguments). To beat a person such as you, all it has to do is lie - and tell you at the end it has been lying all along.


Your premise "open the source code for this, run it in node, get the probability of guessing f or d, and then guess the one that's lower" goes straight against the explicit request to try to type randomly, everything that follows althoug may be correct doesn't apply here.


Choosing to ignore the rules as prescribed is a great demonstration of free will.


Of course, that's precisely what one would predict a user to do.


Nice, thinking out of the "meta-box" here?


I had a professor who, when playing games where the best move was to choose randomly (for instance, in a CCG, forcing the opponent to discard a card from their hand that you designate without seeing their hand), would always roll a die or otherwise mechanically randomize their choice, to ensure that they never exhibited potentially exploitable patterns in selection.


I've been relaying the quote from the readme for years. If you didn't click through:

"In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he “just used his free will.”


I find this way more entertaining than I should


is this determinism's idea of a joke? that I should enjoy marveling at my own lack of free will? (did what I just say even have meaning?)


What this have to do with free will? It's a web page trying to infer the logic behind the user keystrokes. That's it.

Maybe there's some randomness lying deep down in what we experience as free will, but that doesn't mean that we're 100% unpredictable in everything we do.


There are some physicists running around saying that free will is defined as acting randomly even though that's at odds with philosophical and common sense definitions of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem


There's a thread running through free will discussions referred to as "ultimate origination". The Free will theorem touches on this as the sibling commenter mentioned.

There's a fringe view (also help by some of these physicists) that "The more radical group holds that the agent who determines his own will is not causally influenced by external causal factors, including his own character."[1] Start with section 3.2 of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and move on to perhaps the whole article or the referenced primary sources.

My take on the link between the Aaronson Oracle and the ultimate origin view follows like this.

Suppose that we take the radical definition of free will and try to devise a test that demonstrates an individual making a choice not influenced by external causal factors. One thing that comes to mind is to ask that individual to make a choice between two options. If the a choice is not causally influenced by external factors, then we can expect that it will not be predictable.

It's interesting that a number of commenters have reported prediction rates very close to 0.5. Typically in similar hot hand experiments[2] that's not the case and I suspect it's a reporting bias (why should those closer to 1.0 feel the need to report their findings).

There's also a bit of a counter-example in the whole space of pseudo-random number generation that's very much an example of a deterministic system with nothing but external causal factors, but will pass the Aaronson oracle test. On the other hand, truly random sources without any identifiable causal sources (ie radioactive decay) will also pass this test. Both of these passing support an argument that the test has no power to discriminate at all.

My personal take is that I like the idea of thinking about having free will as a spectrum or degree rather than a binary proposition. In the ultimate origin conversation, I don't see external causal factors as being completely avoidable nor unavoidable so having a test whose output is a range of predicability is nice to see.

[1] - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#1

[2] - http://math.williams.edu/the-hot-hand/


This is pressing two letters, and you're explicitly told to press them in a way which feels random (which is going to be culturally determined). Aristotle would say that this is about habit, not free will -- unless you're opting to ignore the instructions.


Can you elaborate on how one's perception of randomness is subject to cultural bias? You do have to realize that frequent runs of repeated characters are expected to appear in a truly random sequence, but that's more a matter of basic reasoning (or perhaps education) than culture.


"FFFFFFFF" or "DDDDDDD" are random sequences if they're generated by a random process, but we [note: I wonder who 'we' means] expect "random" to mean "frequently changing" or "chaotic-looking".

This might easily be more about formal education in statistics than about culture, though. I'd expect people from any culture we know about to have the intuitive expectations I mentioned -- identifying randomness with chaos.



There is a strong cultural bias for believing that everything is culturally determined.


Seems to me there's two ways of doing this:

1. Totally clear your mind of the previous letter and make each letter a separate decision. That way you only have to avoid being biased toward using one letter or the other too much. This is probably pretty hard.

2. Allow yourself to be aware of your previous answers, but thwart your own biases by including patterns that cancel them out.

I went with the second option and consistently got between .45 and .55. I know our main bias around randomness is not realizing how many runs and patterns exist in truly random data. So I occasionally included runs like "fff" and "dddd" and, rarely, patterns like "dfdf" and "fdfd."


Or assign a letter to each side of a coin and start flipping


I failed to exercise free will in this case.

Free will is in play as and to the extent that my future is determined by my decisions, rather than by other factors beyond my control. For example, if I'm walking down the street, I have free will in the matter of whether I go North or South, but not in the matter of whether I go up or down.

I tried typing some letters because I was curious to see what the output would be. But for some reason, the page didn't work on my browser; no output was produced. Thus, my attempt to exercise free will was foiled.


No explanation given of how this has anything to do with free will.


Click through to the github


When I get to look at the average I can keep it under 0.5 if I change the key every time the number goes up (and I keep pressing the same key if that strategy stops working).

As arguments against free will go... I think people with no short-term memory make a pretty solid case. You'd think with all the complex activity in our brains we'd at least behave a little randomly based on some chaotic processes, but without your short-term memory you begin to sound like a broken record.


I am stuck at around 0.76.

I think its flawed - Whatever I press it never changes by more than 1%

How can the prediction for 'f' be 0.764 and for 'd' be 0.763 - they don't add up to 1.


I assume it's a running success rate.

It's making a (hidden) prediction about what key you'll press, and it's displaying the number of times it was correct over all your key presses.

So, the more you've pressed the keys, the less each successive press will change it's overall success rate.


It isn't telling you the odds of what you'll do next. It's telling you how often its hidden predictions been right so far. So if you've hit 100 keys, and it secretly guessed 75 of them right, it will display 0.75. The more you play, the more slowly this number moves, because each additional guess has a smaller effect on the overall average.


>The more you play, the more slowly this number moves, because each additional guess has a smaller effect on the overall average.

Not exactly, seems to be a running average with a specific window.


I was able to get it to slowly go down, more or less, by switching things up whenever I saw the percentage start increasing. Usually kept doing the same key or pattern as long as it went down and as soon as it started ticking up I switched it.


A couple things I did to get it down to ~.44 Press based on random environmental input (woman's voice on tv = f, man's voice = d, while flipping channels). Do it very quickly, while paying attention to something else that utterly absorbs your attention, and don't look at the meter.


It's pretty good, got me at 0.76. It seems you can switch patterns to make it go down, but if you just mash f and d it rises pretty quickly.


It's not very good, it's hovering around 0.5, which I think means it's guessing about as well as chance?

Also it's broken in Safari.


It doesn't work in Safari because they used arrow syntax for JS function, which is not supported in Safari: ` () => { `


It's simple to get it down to 50%. Don't try to be random. Watch the whites, and beat them with reds, game theory style.


For a sense of urgency, imagine you're Manny Pacquiao and trying to hit Floyd Mayweather without resorting to this predictable series of left-right punches https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZklifGarQc


Strictly speaking, this is a Shannon Oracle: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/245008/why-di...


I chose not to press either button. The ultimate act of free will! (Just kidding, I got stuck around 0.63)


I'm on mobile.

My choice was taken away from me.


http://imgur.com/qREH4Jh I guess I'm pretty random. I don't know what using your free will has anything to do with this. In fact, this may be the opposite of free will.


0.5072463768115938[1] but only did it for about 2 minutes (don't want to ruin my keyboard). That seems basically like it's unable to predict.

1. http://cl.ly/2c1R1X0z262i


http://imgur.com/qREH4Jh I guess I'm pretty random. I don't think this has anything to do with free will, in fact, I think this is the opposite.


I realize that this is just a lark, but I just want to state for the record (as it were) that "free will" is such an ill-defined concept that any result from this is wrong and right at the same time. So there.


Pressing in between the keys so I randomly hit both of them was the only way I could be unpredictable. That got a 4.9. Pressing back and forth trying to act as "random" as I could I stayed around a 7.8. Cool experiment


Seems odd to call it free will. If you were 100% deterministic then sure you have no free will, but predictable, even very predictable is not the same as having no free will.

Has anyone done a control test with an RNG to see what happens?


This is just a branch predictor!

It would be interesting to play with more modern branch prediction algorithms (e.g., Andre Seznec's recent work) with the same interactive interface. I haven't seen anyone do this before...


I started reading "Quantum Computing since Democritus" recently, the book that inspired this, and it is fantastic. Highly recommended if you like an entertaining walkthrough of some pretty heavy theory.




I didn't have a coin on my so I started tossing my keys on the floor and picking a letter based on the direction of the largest key. Ended up predictably around 0.5


I got mine up to 0.8~ and decided to spend some time trying to out-predict the machine and get my score lower. I got it down to 0.6 before it got really difficult


I got 0.62 I guess that means I'm not perfectly random.


The following strategy seems to result in consistently 50% or less, typically ~45%: If it got the previous guess correct, swap the key, otherwise keep the same.


It didn't show anything until I pressed a bunch of keys. Then it came up at 0.3-ish. Then climbed to just around 0.5. I guess I'm fairly random.


I keep hitting both keys at the same time (from my point of view), but apparently I'm 80% predictable.

What, does the IRQ for 'F' fire first or something?


I'm not sure there has to be anything odd going on. If you hit both keys at the same time, you can never produce the same letter three times in a row – which is extremely predictable!


I get 0.50877 after a while. What's the big deal?


We are rational beings, shouldn't we expect to have trouble being random? But wait, does that mean I don't have free will?! Aargh!


0.52. The whole time I was trying to disconnect control of my fingers from my brain... Trying to get my hand to just do what it wants.


0.375 -- I guess I'm not perfectly random.


Does 0.375 has same randomness as 0.625?


For what, 5 inputs?


Can't help but compare this to the American elections, 2 choices, republican or democrat.

This algorithm should work on that as well... :(


If you're left handed, use your right hand. And vice versa. I scored around <= 0.3 consistently.


Good one. Right handed when really just typing as fast and supposedly as randomly as I can, it was at 0.99 and continuing to converge to 1. Left-handed (especially if I switch which fingers I use occasionally), I was < 0.4.


I have pi memorized to a fair number of digits, so I decided to try that.

d 3 times f 1 time d 4 times etc.

... and got 50% almost exactly.


Can this be used for game AI? I think it could. I wonder if people could apply this to games like Tennis? Or maybe to approaches to the basket in Basketball?

I am using KeePass 1.31's Random Password generator with minus and underline. The oracle is getting 59%. Hmm. Also, when I generate a 64 character string with two possible characters, KeePass claims I have 72 bits of entropy. Hmmm!


I What would it mean, statistically, if it's getting it right less than 50% of the time?


It says "My last guesses (most recent at bottom):"

But the most recent guess is at the top.


Man, that's an awful lot of code to do something so conceptually simple.


displaying the accuracy changes my behavior. I'd like it to log the prediction, result, and accuracy, and after a set number of configurable presses, it displays the report summary.


I tried pressing l and q repeatedly, I liked those letters better....


I'm at 54%, does that mean I can get a job at google as a PRNG?


I freely choose to be predictable. Randomness is not free will.


Wish there was a mobile version. Can't play it on my phone.


Got the dude down to 0.4 by invoking pi. Pretty good predictor!


I got it to .41 predictability. Does that mean I am a demigod?


Got to 0.5000000000000001 and decided to stop there. :-)


Fairly consistently between .50 and .55 here.


0.47058823529411764 is the first number to appear, kept it in the .5 to .57 range for the next 50 or so presses ... got board.


fddffdddfffddfdffddfdfddffdfdfddfdfdfddffdfdfdfddfffddffddddffdfd


that's it. i have no free will.


ffddfdfdddffddffddfffdddffdd


for me it's below 0.5


next...


So. I have done a similar thing for a while now. I call it adversarial selection. I ask a participant(p) to guess a number [1,10] repeatedly. After they guess a number, I immediately tell them my guess of their selected number. Immediately after I guess they are instructed to make a new guess and tap the table indicating they have picked a number. The point is to go through these generations very fast.

Often what I'll observe is they try to mimic a random distribution by selecting a number far away from their last selection, but sometimes they somehow catch on and start saying things like the same number (rare) or a number close to it. This gets interesting because they usually start cycling between picking a number far away and close, but they do so with a particular pattern. I'm able to guess their numbers well beyond a random distribution, and it all comes down the the idea that they are trying to make a random number or trick me, which produces a blueprint of behavior.


"I ask a participant(p)"

Good forward planning to allocate a variable to hold a reference to the participant in case you need to refer to them later in the story, though in this case it turned out not to be needed. I need to start doing this in anecdotes. "So I was chatting with a colleague (C), and he mentioned..."


I was responding to a Hacker News comment (H), and it said...


To be fair, it's kind of the same thing as just using someone's name: "So I was chatting with my colleague Chris, and he mentioned..."


Are you sure the 10% chance isn't standing out more in your memory? It would be interesting to measure this over hundreds of guesses.

It seems likely that the probability of guessing correctly would be around 1/9, since people rarely pick the same number, but is a sustained 1/8 or better really possible?



I have an algorithm that can guess that sequence right 62% of the time then ;)


33% after it started responding and I got bored after 20 or so more attempts. I imagine it'd train up higher over time.

But I have to agree with the posters who say that free will and predictability are not the same thing.


It says it will predict which key I will press next but it doesn't say which key it's predicting. is it f or d?


It guesses what key you'll hit next. It has a naive assumption of when I will hit it next. (Eventually)


So?


This means the algo only works in serial contexts, not in parallel ones.


It's written in a browser running Javascript, so by definition is only works on serial contexts. Plus, the key switches on your keyboard would give you at most 2 signals in parallel (f and d).




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