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cubefox

Here it is:

https://aaronsonoracle.com/

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I got 64% at 50 steps in, then dropped down to 53%.

The secret? I distracted myself with the website text and kept pressing the buttons quickly without thinking about it.

I have managed to get 38-48% the times I tried. I believe I might have been influenced by the article I just read. It would be interesting to see if by giving people advice on statics it would produce, on average, a measurably different outcome.

I got it down to 39% after 66 presses. It would be harder if it didn’t show you the rate. I was definitely learning from the feedback

I don't get the fuss? 163 presses in and the machine scores 48%. You just ... randomly press the buttons? Should I play for even longer?

> (...) 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.”

- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus.

Just use your free will, bro!

yeah i did 329 presses and got 55%. Doesn't seem that hard i wasn't even being very random, i just sort of zoned out and mashed them

A simple way to score 50%ish is to take a sequence of text and press the left button if even length, right button if odd.

This is what I also use for rock, paper scissors (mod 3). You can also use second hand of a watch for random samples, e.g splitting 0-30 vs. 31-60.

Similar to me, when I have to choose randomly I look for a number anywhere around. If it's odd, one choice, even is the other.

My strategy for rock paper scissors is to always go rock, and tell everyone that's my strategy. It's more fun for me seeing how people deal with that information than the win would be. Not very random though

I think Zipf's law means you're biased towards odd in that case (unless you allow yourself to choose empty strings)

I don't think Zipf's law gives you this. It mostly says that common words tend to be short, but it doesn't tell you what proportion of the text will be common words. For example, in English writing two-letter words are found much more than one-letter words.

However, I think you're correct anyway. The right distribution to look at is something like the orange series in the bottom graph on [0]. Eyeballing it, it does look like 3/5/7/9/11-letter words appear more in aggregate than those of 2/4/6/8/10 (49% Vs 44.5%), and longer words are a rounding error.

[0] https://medium.com/@davidxu90/relative-frequencies-of-words-...

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