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by want2takearide 1513 days ago
I had the same issue. I generated random numbers and still got over 60 years old. I had to dive deep into it, and it turns out that the original paper is shit.

They ask participants to make sequences that are as random as possible but they use Kolmogorov complexity as a measure, which (surprise) doesn't actually measure randomness but complexity. Random distributions tend to have lower complexity than what humans generate; see [1] Fig. 4. Here are the complexity scores for different sequences if you want to lose more sleep over this: [2]. At least the authors were nice enough to be open about their data, so props I guess.

[1]: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/s13428-015-057...

[2]: https://github.com/algorithmicnaturelab/HumanBehavioralCompl...
1 comments
m3047 1513 days ago
Maybe the null hypothesis needs to be that older people have more experience of "random" and therefore expect or tolerate more variance before rejecting "chance".

But they say that the effect is relatively small, or that their age guessing is "not as good as we had expected".

I'd be prone to misinterpreting the question.

If somebody asked me if the sequence "HTHTHTHT" is more or less likely to occur than “HTHHTHTT” I'd be confused. Ok, are they rejecting that they're equally likely out of hand, and if so why? At least subconsciously. If forced to suggest one or the other I'd offer the latter even though I know it's not mathematically correct.

Additionally most of the problems I deal with have to do with probability within a continuous run and in a run of 1000 heads/tails and some quick and dirty Monte Carlo I get:

    m3047@sophia:~/temp> ./sequences.py | grep -E 'HTHTHTHT|HTHHTHTT'
     11 HTHTHTHT
      6 HTHHTHTT
    m3047@sophia:~/temp> ./sequences.py | grep -E 'HTHTHTHT|HTHHTHTT'
      8 HTHTHTHT
      3 HTHHTHTT
    m3047@sophia:~/temp> ./sequences.py | grep -E 'HTHTHTHT|HTHHTHTT'
      5 HTHTHTHT
      4 HTHHTHTT
So I'd be wrong in practice at least with whatever PRNG is being utilized or maybe I'm just lucky. Always good to test and ask questions.
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