Hacker News Reader

Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

> As for our initial idea to make an age-guessing game, we have guessed right 51% of the time. Pretty much what we had expected .

They guessed I was 'Under 60', which I am, but over 50% of people fit into the category of under 60... so the fact they can guess this with only 50% of accuracy doesn't really feel right?

View on HN

I think that's their point. Since there isn't an actual correlation, their guess is basically 50/50.

GP is saying it's even more than 50/50. Less than half of people are >60. A more extreme example would be if it guessed: "You are younger than 99 years old."

Yeah, 'We tried to work out the impact of age on randomness, and guessed that people were younger than 99 years old 50% of the time!"

But if their guess is 50/50, that is from a subset that is mostly under-60's, which presumably means that they have evidence for the opposite?

(i.e. there is no statement that the 51% figure is age adjusted)

I'm probably just being silly here...

I think they're saying over or under 60 is completely arbitrary when judging only from 'random' answers. It could be over or under a month, or 1000 years, the result would still be 50/50 because the ability to create a sequence that appears random has no link to age.

I also guess that the segment of the population interested in a self-described "digital publication that makes data fun" probably skews even younger than the population. FWIW I was guessed to be over 60 but am not.

Yeah, most of us here got “over 60” because we inputted data with repeated values, because we know real random data has repeated values. I’m not sure if we overdid it or the study has a weird metric of “looks random”.

Seems to have changed a bit...

"As for our initial idea to make an age-guessing game, we have guessed right NaN% of the time. Not as good as we had expected ."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com