Science Couch: Why Humans Misjudge Randomness

Is all life predestined, or is existence blown about by the whims of entropy? If we restarted the universe with the same world generating seed a la Minecraft, would it all play out the same??? These are ginormous questions that we do not get into in this episode! Instead, we're examining slightly more manageable examples of randomness in nature, in computing, and even in ourselves. 

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[The Scientific Definition]

The Lost Boarding Pass Problem

https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/23162

The Secretary Problem

https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~ted/210F10/References/Secretary.pdf

https://slate.com/technology/2014/12/the-secretary-problem-use-this-algorithm-to-determine-exactly-how-many-people-you-should-assess-before-making-a-new-hire-or-choosing-a-life-partner.html

The Sleeping Beauty Problem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW27QJYNXtU

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-sleeping-beauty-problem-is-keeping-mathematicians-awake/

[Trivia Question]

Sum of numbers on a D120 vertex where 10 faces meet

https://www.wired.com/2016/05/mathematical-challenge-of-designing-the-worlds-most-complex-120-sided-dice/

[Fact Off]

Fastest computer worm in history was the random-scanning worm called Slammer (aka the Sapphire Worm) 

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/IEEESP03.pdf

https://www.science.org/content/article/fastest-worm-ever

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1523881

Effectiveness of randomly promoting employees in a business instead of promoting by merit

[Ask the Science Couch]

Humans are (maybe) bad at intuitively understanding or predicting randomness

https://cocosci.princeton.edu/tom/papers/hard.pdf

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5215234/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5933241/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027717302895

https://zhaolab.psych.ubc.ca/pdfs/Zhao_2014_JEPHPP.pdf

Patreon bonus: pseudorandom number generators and randomization seeds

https://www.random.org/randomness/

https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/pseudorandom_number_generator

https://www.acsac.org/2003/papers/79.pdf

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/

[Butt One More Thing]

Dung beetles that attach themselves to butts to find poop non-randomly

https://www.sfzoo.org/dung-beetle/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19169550/

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