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This is a nice spin on the Aaronson oracle: > 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.”
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I'd never heard of the Aaronson oracle so thanks for the link! I actually built this on a whim after watching that episode of TNG where Data locks everyone out of the Enterprise. https://youtube.com/watch?v=rERApU26PcA
The implementation on that website (https://aaronsonoracle.com/) is uncanny, I recommend everyone to check it out And it inspired me to build a little game based on it. See if AI can read you mind: https://jeffyclassify.com/blog/mind-reader/
There's another version where a stats professor divides people into two groups. One group flips a coin 50 times and writes on a whiteboard the results. The other comes up with 50 results. They leave the room and when they come back immediately know which is which. Specifically because of the over-alternation that yours mentioned. A string of HHHHHH is exactly as likely as HTHTHT, but people don't intuit that.
Here it is: https://aaronsonoracle.com/
Someone shared a small game based on this a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598051 (archived now): https://web.archive.org/web/20260625105410/https://brainfrog...