Us humans (this is not an A.I. post, bleep bloop) have a tendency to try to find patterns in randomness. For example, when asked to pick a number between 1 and 10, a magician/mentalist will know that statistically humans are more likely to choose certain numbers. There is alot of “human nature” that makes us somewhat predictable.
In a deck of 52 playing cards, if you were asked to predict what card is on the top of a shuffled deck, you probably wouldn’t say Ace of Diamonds, but that card is just as likely to be there as any other. No matter which card you guess, you have a 1 in 52 chance of being correct.
Call it in the air…
When it comes to a coin toss, do you always call heads? Always tails? Or do you alternate?
When a gambling casino game presents a grid of squares and asks you to pick four squares, do you “randomly” pick various squares, or do you just click the first four on the top row?
If it is random, either should have the same outcome.
And don’t get me started on picking lottery numbers. While we do not often see the picked numbers be “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6”, that sequence should be just as likely as any other.
If it is random.
So let’s play a game in BASIC with a coin toss. Heads or tails will be represented using CoCo’s Color Basic RND() command. Doing RND(2) will produce either a 1 or 2 result.
NOTE: This is not random. This is psuedo random. I have discussed this previously, but for the sake of this blog post we will pretend it truly is random.
Would calling heads every time produce a better result than calling tails? Or would randomly choosing heads or tails each flip be better?
Let’s try…
0 'COINFLIP.BAS
5 'POKE 65495,0
10 W1=0:W2=0
20 FOR A=1 TO 1000
30 V=RND(2)
40 IF V=1 THEN W1=W1+1
50 IF V=RND(2) THEN W2=W2+1
60 NEXT
70 PRINT "ALWAYS GUESSING 1:";W1
80 PRINT "GUESSING RAND 1-2:";W2This program will “randomly” flip a coin 1000 times and count how many times it landed on heads (1) versus how many times it matched a randomly (1-2) chosen value. At the end, it will print the results:
As you can see, in this “random” test, neither method really proved to be that different. We could also alter the output to print how many times guessing tails (2) would have worked (1000 clips minus how many times it was heads, 511 in this example, so 489 if my math is correct).
But it still feels better thinking we have some “control” over things and guessing rather than always choosing the same guess.
Alphabetically speaking…
Let’s modify the program to select a random letter, A-Z (represented by 1-26). We will now always guess A, versus randomly guess a letter (1-26):
0 'COINFLP2.BAS
5 'POKE 65495,0
10 W1=0:W2=0
20 FORA=1TO1000
30 V=RND(26)
40 IF V=1 THEN W1=W1+1
50 IF V=RND(26) THEN W2=W2+1
60 NEXT
70 PRINT"ALWAYS GUESSING 1:";W1
80 PRINT"GUESSING RND 1-26:";W2
And here is what I get…
Maybe this perspective will help you “always choose tails” or “always guess Aces of Spades” in the future.
And speaking of the future, there is another “random” test I want to experiment with, coming soon.
Until then…
This obviously mostly tests the quality of the random number generator.
Re lottery numbers: You could analyze how often each number is selected for a particular lottery and go with the ones that have shown up the most often. If there were any imperfections in the then mechanical machines (like picking a random ball when turning a crank or whatnot) they would show up as certain numbers having a slightly higher chance of being selected. I would think that for any lottery that is larger than say “the touring regional carnival” would do their own analysis and adjust any imperfections. But for the “touring regional carnival” especially someone working at the carnival, but not directly involved in any lottery, could collect statistics and have a slightly higher chance at winning. Maybe.
Are you volunteering to flip a real coin 1000 times … for science? ;)
This is all inspired by something “stupid” someone actually did on YouTube to test a random thing. Hoping to write more parts leading up to a similar simulation to see if it matches reality.
It’s not like we have much reason to believe human coin flippers are random, for that matter.
There is an excellent coin flip magic trick that gained popularity recently that shows it can 100% not be random, as well.
Hey, you know that “wall of lava lamps” that is used for random number generation? I wonder if they have an API or web page you can use to pull a truly random number. That would be an interesting way to see if it is much different.
Lava Lamps are gone, but I found this: https://www.random.org
It even has a coin flipper that just tells you the results at the end after showing photos of all the flips.
The trick I normally use when I’m in one of these very basic BASICs is take advantage of the human factor:
10 PRINT “PRESS ANY KEY TO START THE DRAW”
20 IF INKEY$<>”” THEN GOTO 40
30 X=RND(0):GOTO 20
40 PRINT “SLIGHTLY LESS PREDICTABLE RESULT IS”;X
To keep seeding, based on how long the user takes to hit a key. That is a good approach.
With Extended Color BASIC, they added a TIMER and you could see with RND(-TIMER), but when I went to make my Lights Out program (for CoCo and VIC-20), elsewhere in this blog, I realized I could run on a 4K CoCo … but no TIMER. So I think I did something similar to generate a random seed.