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Subject: Re: human failings question
From: David Honig (honigsprynet.com)
Date: Thu Oct 05 2000 - 11:23:56 CDT

At 09:07 PM 10/3/00 -0400, Nina H. Fefferman wrote:
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> Does anyone know where (if at all) I can find statistics for the
>predictable strings humans tend to produce when asked to create a
>"random" sequence of zeros and ones? Maybe cognitive science papers?
> Has anyone seen these?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nina Fefferman

I have no specific ref in mind, but I do remember that humans
find long runs (e.g., 01011000000110) unrandom, when asked to
pick one excerpt vs. another. There was a
recent paper on the perception of 'lucky streaks' in basketball,
which unearthed their superstitious nature (ie an artifact of learning
algorithms, like randomly-reinforced pigeons' "superstitions").
So come to think of it, there are more papers on (mis)perceiving randomness
than on (mis)generating it.

Here's an interesting question: could you train someone to give
more random sequences by merely giving them an entropy-measure as
feedback? (Hmm, one could write a program which ran this experiment on
human subjects)