Can a human simulate a random generator?

**CryoDragoon** · 04-08-2011 11:39 AM

"trying to be random" has its problems.

apparently magicians, gamblers, etc. have been using this flaw of predictability in humans as well. 'Pick a random number between 0 and 10', and the typical answer would be three or seven. The same with 'Pick a random number between 0 and 100', and the same thing would occur: 37 apparently is the most common answer.
I've heard of similar stories where some teacher asked his class to pull out their calculators and push the 'random' button 100 times or so to produce either a 'heads' (1) or a tails (0) result, and write down what they got. When he got the results, it is said that he actually could see who used the random number generator and who just went on ahead and *tried* to be random by skipping the time-consuming work of actually pushing the button and thinking of what they thought to be random strings of 0s and 1s. The people who tried to be random, for example, didn't have strings such as 1111111111111100 or something, which (apparently) is completely plausible when it is generated randomly.
We all know this.. We have all done multiple choice exams where at some point we got a huge line of answers that were completely the same. "what? BBBBBBBBBBB? That can't be right.."

Also: look up the Pilot episode of the Numb3rs series. It deals with this same subject. Plus, the series is pretty cool

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_(Numb3rs)

Here's some other stuffs for you folks to look at, it's pretty interesting