Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand | Hacker News Reader

Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

people.ischool.berkeley.edu

324 pointskelseyfrog269 comments

The prediction algorithm is actually very straightforward[1]. It's a fun exercise to write a sequence generator specifically to defeat it. Here is a sequence that can get the prediction rate down to 13%:

    ddddd dfddd dffdd dfdfd ddfff ddfdd fdffd dffdf ddfff fdfdf
    dfffd ffdff fffff dffff ffddf fffdf dfffd ffdff ffffd ddfff

Generated using this Perl script:

    my %table = ();
    my $s = "fffff";
    
    for(my $i = 0; $i < 100; $i++)
    {
       if( $i % 5 == 0 )
       {
          print $i % 50 == 0 ? "\n" : " ";
       }
    
       my $output;
       if( exists $table{$s} )
       {
          # Output opposite of what would be predicted.
          $output = $table{$s}{"f"} > $table{$s}{"d"} ? "d" : "f";
          $table{$s}{$output}++;
       }
       else
       {
          # No prediction yet.  Original source defaults to "f", so we will
          # output "d".
          $output = "d";
          $table{$s}{"d"} = 1;
          $table{$s}{"f"} = 0;
       }
       print $output;
       $s = substr($s, 1) . $output;
    }
    print "\n";

If you can type carefully, increasing the length to 200 brings the prediction rate down to 10%.

[1] https://github.com/elsehow/aaronson-oracle/blob/master/src/i...

The creator knew you would do that...

Please elaborate.

you wouldn't do anything else

that is part of the 'free will'

Just a joke. If I explain it it becomes unfunny.

You can improve that by around 13% if you soften the inequality (your > should be >=, I believe)

   table = {}
   s = 'ddddd'
   for i in range(100):
       if i%5 == 0:
           print(s)
       state = table.setdefault(s, {'f':0, 'd':0})
       s = s[1:] + ('f' if state['f'] <= state['d'] > 0 else 'd')
       state[s[-1]] += 1

Inevitable. Gotta love HN.

To be sporting, I left a little bug resulting from my weird compulsion to golf snippets like this.

>The prediction algorithm is actually very straightforward[1]. It's a fun exercise to write a sequence generator specifically to defeat it.

if you are inspecting the prediction algorithm, and you want to specifically defeat it, doesn't that mean copy the prediction algorithm and throw a "not" on it? It's the old halting problem trick...

You should indeed try and target a 50% accuracy rate.

maybe I don't understand, 50% is the goal? when I played I thought % was how often it predicted what I pressed, and even though 0% is 100% wrong which is 100% right in a parallel universe, it would still represent me winning.

in any case, my post was serious, regardless of the % number, if you are inspecting their algorithm and writing your own, I can't understand why you wouldn't use theirs in yours. Finding an isomorphism might be fun, but it's not necessary.

50% means it is "no better than random" while 0% means it is accurately predicting what you won't press and 100% means it is accurately predicting what you will press.

> it is accurately predicting what you won't press

That is not what it's predicting. You have changed the definition of predict so that an incorrect prediction can be misinterpreted as a correct prediction.

If you have two choices ... and I always predict the wrong one ... another way to say that is: "I always predict the one you won't choose." If I can't actually predict which one you choose, then statistically, I should be right 50% of the time.

So? If I can reliably lose every basketball game, that doesn't make be perfect at basketball.

To put it more plainly: if you were wagering on the outcome, would you rather win 50% of the time (EV=0) or 100% of the time (EV=max)?

100% misprediction is only relevant if a 3rd party adversary is observing the game. In the absence of such an adversary, being reliably wrong it worthless.

100% misprediction of two choices is an error in the algorithm. You could flip the prediction at the end and be 100% right.

50% misprediction cannot be improved upon with trivial methods.

You are comparing to things that don't even make sense in the current context.

You have two choices.

I predict correctly or I predict incorrectly. If I'm randomly guessing, I will be right 50% of the time (effectively, this is a coin flip). If I always guess incorrectly, then I'm correctly guessing the incorrect choice. If I always guess correctly, then I'm correctly guessing the correct choice.

I'm trying to explain why 50% is your target for "fooling the algorithm" and not 0%, which is not fooling the algorithm at all. There's no reason to be obtuse here, I'm legitimately trying to help you understand some statistics... this isn't an argument, it doesn't matter "what you believe" ... this is math.

> If I always guess incorrectly, then I'm correctly guessing the incorrect choice.

No, you aren't, because you aren't saying that it is the incorrect choice. You are saying it is the correct one.

Another way to put it is that there obviously exists an algorithm that can predict what you will choose. It just isn’t this one, but the opposite. The entire point of this exercise is to prove that you have free will. If there obviously exists an algorithm that can predict what you will do, you don’t have free will, do you?

Thus “random,” aka, 50% is the target: this algorithm cannot predict what you do; you have free will.

50% or 0% are both interesting goals, but the headline implies that the website is some test of free will. If you get 0%, then it shows there is an algorithm that predicts your performance, and the Kolmogorov complexity is finite. That algorithm is the inverse of the one the website is using.

If we conflate "free-will" with "ability to generate truly random sequences" then the goal should be to generate a completely incompressible, unpredictable sequence, which 50% would probably be closer to.

> If I can reliably lose every basketball game, that doesn't make be perfect at basketball

What they are saying is that when you have an algorithm you can reverse it to do the opposite. If you could reverse your basketball skills exactly that would be true for your statement.

In the case of this test, 0% means you're defeating the prediction algorithm.

50% means (if you're predicting their prediction) means you're achieving random.

"Free will" is a bit strong, it's more about whether people can produce randomness, which they generally can't.

People who are good at chess sometimes like to play reverse chess where the goal is to get checkmated. If you are playing against another good player it can be quite difficult -- as difficult as winning under the normal conditions.

Okay, I get you. And you're right, if I pitted a 'random' program against this site, the outcome would tend toward 50%.

Yes, but...

50% prediction rate would indicate that half of the time you are predictable, meaning you don't have much free will.

0% prediction rate would indicate that you have 100% free will.

Randomness is not a good measure of free will.

Maybe the issue is that we're being too discrete, thinking in terms of absolute predictability or absolute unpredictability.

Ultimately a 50% prediction rate means that you are as unpredictable as is possible, the state of maximum entropy. Any deviation from 50%, towards 100% or 0%, is a state of lower entropy.

You can forget the free will and just consider a fair coin toss. If someone had the ability to always guess a coin toss incorrectly, every single time, then you'd know that this person possesses something absolutely incredible and unique, rather magical. Similarly if they guess a coin toss correctly every single time they would also possess something magical.

It's the person who can only correctly guess a coin toss 50% of the time that is uninteresting, ordinary and possesses absolutely no special or magical insight. But deviating from 50% would require having some knowledge about the coin. A 0% prediction rate would require having total knowledge of the coin, so would a 100% prediction rate. It's 50% that requires having no knowledge whatsoever.

If we forget free will, then I will grant your position regarding statistics.

But suppose you could collect every bit of evidence in the universe and use it in a massive calculation to guess what my next decision would be.

This would be a test of whether I had free will, or whether I was simply doing what the universe made me do. If I wanted to demonstrate free will, I wouldn’t be aiming for random. I’d be aiming to make your guess wrong as often as I could.

If I could make your guess wrong 100% of the time, this would not mean that you could simply flip the bit on your guess next time. You can modify the calculation after every guess and it wouldn’t matter. I’d still do what your calculation thought I wouldn’t based on previous history. If I could do that, that would be a magical thing. Yes. I would have demonstrated completely free will according to this test.

This is why we call rand(), not freewill().

Free will is not random at all. It means you wear the shirt you want to wear, not a completely random shirt.

Oh, and before somebody objects, yes this is a terrible test of free will. Because whether I want to score high or low on the test or in the middle is up to me if I have free will. ;)

There really isn’t a “yes but” here, this is stats 101. Welcome to the class.

A 0% prediction rate means that you are 100% predictable by simply taking the opposite of the algorithm’s input or output. Thus, you have no free will (according to this tool).

Free will is not a topic for stats, but rather philosophy.

That’s totally off-topic. We are talking about this tool.

Oh come on. The tool is supposedly designed to test “free will.”

Your presupposition seems to be that randomness = free will.

I propose that being forced to choose a random letter is the opposite of free will.

The 50% goal is against an adaptative adversary. For some reason, Zero Knowledge Proof[1] came to my mind, so I interpreted the goal as reaching a 50% accuracy on the oracle side.

Your interpretation of the goal is also valid, but not in a cryptography context, for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_knowledge_proof

It is an exercise of free will to overcome the imposed barriers of some test.

Although I do believe we have free will, I don't agree with this specific example: looking at the algorithm used to predict key presses and just doing the opposite of what would the algorithm predicts, is letting the algorithm tell you what to do. This is related to inverse psychology.

How do you define free will?

Even a Turing machine has free will. You can’t find out what it will do without running it, in a way beyond all questions of technical capability. Mechanistic attacks on free will died with godel.

Yes, if you define an array of transistors to have free will, it certainly does!

I would say it's a measure of probability. Of course measuring probability in non repeatable situations gets tricky.

But, if I wrote there is a 90% probability that lupire will write an application to 'beat' the free will program, and then you did so, it should at least give you pause.

I say that I have free will because my decisions come from myself and not from something outside me. Sure, the context in which I live can influence my decisions, but the final choice is mine and it can happen that I take a decision that goes against what the context (society, family etc.) would expect from me.

The context part is clear but how do you define "myself"? :)

Yes, I had the same discussion a couple years ago and I concluded it by saying that it boils down what's myself: is it my brain? My consciousness? My soul? But this is a related but different problem.

You feel your decisions come from yourself - whatever that is. That's not at all the same as having objective proof they do.

I call this the "subjective experience of free will": that is, it does seem to be a thing that people perceive, and it's such a convincing effect that we often turn it from a subjective experience to an objective belief (that free will exists).

Sure, I never said I have an objective proof. But there's no proof of the contrary either, so the two positions are at the same level, objectively speaking.

To an external observer, you are nothing by a very complex set of chemical and electrical reactions.

With sufficient technology, we could take a snapshot of your brain and predict exactly how you respond to any given stimulus with 100% accuracy.

Free will is an illusion. Consciousness is undefinable and unprovable.

> With sufficient technology, we could take a snapshot of your brain and predict exactly how you respond to any given stimulus with 100% accuracy.

This is assuming that intelligence is computable, but no one has proved it yet. And doesn't even get into the problems of quantum physics. Unfortunately, the real illusion is determinism.

Could technology be sufficient?

I mean you've got a body, too, right? So the moment the environment changes so does the mind state. So unless you've come up with a method of modeling all of those influences... And food, and hormones, and... And then you've got stuff like cosmic radiation slamming into your DNA causing dsDNA breakage and that precipitates into apoptosis and suddenly the model is off due to some completely unpredictable shit, 'cause were talking about interactions that are occuring on the scale of 6.022*10^23 per mol, and a lot of mols and a lot of different species of matter themselves subject to probability moreso than determinism at any reasonable scale.

If sufficient technology were to emerge, I expect that under no circumstances would it ever be considered as a worthy project to invest in. But the idea of such technology ever emerging itself is frankly worthy of ridicule.

first, how do you define the will part? what is will such that it can be free or not?

Does it count if you allow the test to be accurate but you still maintain control over when it is wrong?

I just spammed F and randomly hit D and it pretty much never predicted the D.

Which I think captures a fundamental flaw in algorithms vs humans. Humans know how to mask their signals within noise. I'm inclined to believe the generalization that algorithms that aim for accuracy are highly susceptible to being manipulated by humans who are allowed to have free will over the inputs.

“Always do F, so they’ll never expect D of you”

I think this is a sound strategy for “getting away with it” in society.

It's not really a flaw in algorithms nor a skill in humans.

It's (also?) a weakness in humans: someone mostly does X, we lean very strongly into the assumption that they will never do !X. This is one of the most basic elements of human-to-human deceipt since ... well, since the dawn of any kind of recorded/remembered human history.

Are you saying you just automated free will in such a simple algorithm?

This goes deeper than we thought.

Yeah, check out the book "Bursts" https://barabasi.com/book/bursts

They automated the intent from their free will

Free will is 50%, this is ultra will.

Even better; if you just type the first 7 blocks:

ddddd dfddd dffdd dfdfd ddfff ddfdd fdffd

That's only 10%.

From the Github description, a quote: "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.”"

I can get it to about 60%. Given the algorithm used, it seems like it should be trivial to "trick" it by just cycling through novel 5-grams over and over, but to be honest I can't be bothered to check. And that would be rather contrary to the point of the exercise, if somewhat undercutting of the premise that free will is equivalent or comparable to randomness.

> I can get it to about 60%. Given the algorithm used, it seems like it should be trivial to "trick" it by just cycling through novel 5-grams over and over, but to be honest I can't be bothered to check. And that would be rather contrary to the point of the exercise, if somewhat undercutting of the premise that free will is equivalent or comparable to randomness.

Right; if you guess completely randomly it will hover around 50%, but if you choose the least-likely 5-gram from your history, then it should end up less than 50%.

yes, I've done some of these before. Ive gotten up above 200 key presses at ~50% before getting bored.

my secret was decidedly less sexy than free will though. i just had XX years of working as a statistician and having a better intuition as to what random strings and numbers actually look like :/

Same here, though I don't have any years of experience working as a statistician.

I did have a job where I had to implement a bunch of cognition tests for scientific studies. Initially I worked purely off the research papers describing how the some of the tests work - apparently by presenting a series of random numbers.

After I had the first few up and running, the feedback from the researchers was that my random numbers weren't random enough. "Weird", I thought... I had seeds for their sessions so I could reproduce the sequences they'd seen and they looked pretty random to me.

In the end it turned out my sequences were "too random", they didn't like any number being repeated, having more than 3 instances of the same number within any 6-digit sequence, and a few other "tweaks". Turns out actual randomness is confusing even for some very experienced and well trained people!

How fast can you do those key presses?

Do you have a memorized random string?

It's easy to be random if you have memorized random (or normal) data that your adversary isn't focused on. For example, early digits of pi work in most cases. Or use a generator to create a sequence to memorize.

quite slow and considered actually. i doubt i could pump them out rapid fire, but maybe i should try. i don't have anything memorised and just go off of feel of runs of numbers.

i have considered trying to memorise some algorithm, but never done it.

i assume that if anyone tried to get me to do these things with a non- uniform distribution I'd probably be screwed, but never tested it.

Free will is equivalent to randomness with many (asymptotically infinite) degrees of freedom.

Not sure if the experiment tests this. (Pressing a different key or closing the browser tab are also variables in this probability distribution.)

> Free will is equivalent to randomness with many (asymptotically infinite) degrees of freedom.

I don't think this is obviously true. I can make a random number generating device with as many degrees of freedom as you like by producing a bunch of vertically polarised photons and measuring their horizontal polarisation. I don't think anyone would describe this system as having "free will".

Conversely humans with "free will" don't usually behave very randomly. They often have reasoning (good or bad) and are able to explain why they took whatever actions they took.

Free will seems to be qualitatively different to randomness.

> Free will seems to be qualitatively different to randomness.

I was going to suggest reading "The Diceman" by Luke Rhinehart [0].

But then I don't want to do that, because it really messes with some people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man

Interestingly, this book is from 1971, whereas a famous duck went through a similar plot already in 1952 [1]. Now, how to decide if I should add this to the Wikipedia entry of "The Dice Man"?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Decision

And Harvey Dent, aka "Two Face", the Batman villain who decides to kill or spare his victims using a coin toss, was first shown in the comics in 1942!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Face

I think that's true, I think free will is more reason (of the general kind that's not only logical but takes into account your mind), than more randomness. Rather, the more your actions are aligned with your own good, brought by understanding yourself and reality, the more free I think you are. (to give an example: is an addicted person free, even if he is in principle doing "what he wants?", or is he trapped by his own desires?) In this sense some people would say I'm a 'compatibilist', because I think there's no great tension between determinism and free will.

Following reason is as deterministic as following your addiction.

Sure determinism and free will are compatible as long as you believe that free will is your emotional reaction to discovering what your mind has determined.

I don't agree that reason correlates with free will. Many people act irrationally. Behavioral economics was developed because "rational actor" predictions applied to large groups of people turned out to be consistently incorrect.

One can willfully be irrational.

I do agree with you though, that free will doesn't necessarily mean "doing what I want" (which is a libertarian principle from the French Revolution), but instead, is freedom from desires. That's true freedom, but is rarely found and achieved only after years of ascetic practice.

A calculator has free will?

> One can willfully be irrational.

Don't confuse "having reasons" with "being rational". Free will is a freedom to act according to your internal reasons, with that process of deliberation over your reasons being responsive to various types of feedback. Those reasons don't have to be rational.

One step back please, the "free will" was an ill-conceived start. The core claim is about how random is human will. Throwing in the word "free" adds confusion.

The will of an addict is a bit less random, okay. Is there anything quantitative going on here besides "some stuff can increase randomness" and "some other stuff can decrease randomness"?

My claim is that randomness is a dead end. It's irrelevant. But I do think free will can be a useful concept (with little relationship to randomness), although it's too complicated for a short comment I think (a complex quantification of how you can realize good things for yourself and the world).

That said, I think this is a nice experiment exactly for surfacing this kind of questioning.

> Free will seems to be qualitatively different to randomness.

There is no such thing as free will, so any attempt to define it will fail.

If we naively define it as something that isn't just pure randomness, but also something that isn't pure causality, then what is it?

Either things are causal, in which case, you can replay everything and arrive at the same point. That doens't fit an intuitive definition of free will.

Or there is randomness, play the same sequence of events again and some inherent randomness will cause a different outcome. That also doesn't fit any intuitive sense of free will.

So, since we can't even define it, it is meaningless to assume there is free will in the first place. We can talk in terms of causality or randomness.

> Either things are causal, in which case, you can replay everything and arrive at the same point. That doens't fit an intuitive definition of free will.

I think this is somewhat inaccurate. I'm not sure if I personally agree with it, but at the very least compatibilism is a serious philosophical viewpoint and shouldn't just be dismissed like this.

In any case I think the concept of "free will" is pretty much independent of randomness. If you provide me with some source of randomness (e.g. some quantum random number generator) I don't think I get more free because of it.

There's an incongruity between a "mechanistic" model of causality and how we actually live, and actually should live.

Your explanation is a good response to the posted experiment, but I don't think it's a good response to common sense, especially when we consider important (largely pragmatic) concepts like agency and responsibility.

> If we naively define it as something that isn't just pure randomness, but also something that isn't pure causality, then what is it?

Read up on Compatibilism. Free will can be defined in a way that's compatible with determinism. A deliberation over values resulting in a justification for a choice, aka "reasons" or "will". When you are "free" to act in accordance with those reasons, ie. you haven't been coerced into acting against your own reasons, then you've made a choice of your own free will. Simple and totally compatible with determinism.

> I can make a random number generating device with as many degrees of freedom as you like by producing a bunch of vertically polarised photons and measuring their horizontal polarisation.

Unless I misunderstand you, this is simply not true. Your device will be exceedingly easy to model, it's just a simple sum of i.i.d. random variables and subject to central limit theorems. (While humans definitely aren't.)

While the sum of many i.i.d. random variables may be easy to model, that doesn't mean that everything involving i.i.d. random variables is easy to model.

How are you defining free will.

I have free will to eat the burger, or not.

The biggest impacts on that decision are whether I like burgers and if I'm hungry.

Whether I'm 'in the mood' is the only random component.

And the outcome isn't random. I can fairly accurately predict that after 20 times of being offered that choice, most people will say no.

51%

I got 42% by just tapping the digits of pi according to even/odd.

I just typed randomly and got 50%. Does that mean I've got more free will than you? Is my will random? I've got my doubts, but I don't have anything better either.

In what way is being unpredictable considered "free will"? Of course it's just being clickbaity but worth mentioning. I've seen this better used to show that humans are poor sources of randomness.

Is there a difference between non-determinism and a free will choice? The latter seems to be a contradiction. A choice implies a reason which would be a cause, thus determinism.

This test is asking to make random 'choices'. This does have value in something such as sports.

It's hard to come up with a scientifically valid test for something as wide and vague as 'free will'. So what happens is that the tests are designed to test for very specific things that are then used to reason better about vague things like 'free will'. What this test is actually focused on is decision making.

The participant in the test is asked to randomly press either button A or B. The cognitive/mental experience of the participant is the following sequence of operations that seem to happen sequentially in time: 1. The participants is asked which button to push. 2. the participant ponders his decision. 3. the participant pushes the chosen button.

But what this test shows is that while the participants internal monologue is still 'deciding' whether to press A or B in step 2. The software is already able to accurately predict the answer at step 1.

So this indicates that even though your internal monologue might still be going "hmm should I pick A or B?", the decision, where your internal monologue eventually will end up, has already been made.

This is what the clickbait headline refers to; even though it feels like we humans are able to dictate and direct our thoughts, it seems that it doesn't entirely works that way.

I don't imagine this is how a top sports competitor outwits their opponent. I expect that they have a theory of mind anticipating what the opponent expects then does something different. If we evolved in this manner, does it help to pretend that the machine has a mind to theorize about?

Hmm, I don't get it. The prediction was accurate 49% of the time, which is what I was expecting in a coin toss like this one. In which way does it predict the answer at step 1 if it's a binary choice with 50% accuracy?

> This is what the clickbait headline refers to; even though it feels like we humans are able to dictate and direct our thoughts, it seems that it doesn't entirely works that way.

The implicit assumption here is that we are not dictating and directing our thoughts just because the outcome of the process of dictating and directing our thoughts may be predictable. This just doesn't follow.

Consider this analogy: a computer program dictates and directs the state of computer memory, but if I'm able to semi-reliably predict the state of computer memory at any point, then that disproves that the computer program dictates and directs the state of computer memory.

Of course that argument is obviously nonsense, no such test can disprove the fact that the program literally dictates and directs the state of computer memory. I also claim by analogy that no such test can disprove that the process of deliberation that we view as free will actually happens, even if that deliberation is deterministic. Determinism and free will are compatible (see Compatibilism).

> even though it feels like we humans are able to dictate and direct our thoughts, it seems that it doesn't entirely works that way.

Because it's not a binary thing, the thought process is more complex but we can take our body for example. We all control our body, right? But now you take an average office worker vs profession sportsman and see that one can do way more precise and measured movements.

Thoughts are similar, you take some buddhist monk who recites 5 hour long mantras by memory for dozen of years and their thought control would be on another level. It is just the question of training and developing the skill.

> even though your internal monologue might still be going "hmm should I pick A or B?", the decision, where your internal monologue eventually will end up, has already been made.

There is an older better experiment by Benjamin Libet of this. The participant is directed to choose whether to press a single button, and watching a fast clock display to report the instant the decision is taken. The measurement and comparison of the brain activity clearly shows deciding to press, many milliseconds before the participant experiences deciding. Therefore, the participant does not have free will, is it not so? Since the decision is done before it is known to be done by the subject.

The retort is simple. The leap to "no free will" ignores that consciousness itself is a processing: the brain component that reconciles the internal input and renders it for externality takes time to do its work. The decision is still made by the participant. The subjective experience is behind the objective activation simply just as the signal for a television screen must pass through the wire before it is translated for pixels.

You have to define free will first, and that is essentially impossible. What is happening in that "processing" though? That is not free will, your will is being determined by the state and context your brain is in. In fact any thing that is not a purely random choice is not a free will, and a purely random choice is not a will at all. The very concept of free will as most people understand it is absurd.

The only definitions of free will that work are deterministic ones.

To elaborate on your TV signal analogy, the TV does not get to "choose" what it shows next no matter the technical reason for the awareness of the choice coming later or not. These are physical deterministic processes.

How about 'post-processing that increases the information of an output signal beyond the information of the input signal', i.e. something that violates the data processing inequality.

The leap from "detectable signals before sensation of choice means no free will" is laughable to me, as it presumes instant signal propagation within the brain, and instant processing speed, neither of which can be presumed. Your brain has to "make the decision" to do something before you can ever sense that you did, and it takes time for signals to propagate and be processed by your brain. It's also known that the brain can to some degree "rewind" time and fill in the blanks with information that it had to infer after an action was taken, such as how the brain fills in microsaccades.

> able to dictate and direct our thoughts

All the test does is show that humans are bad at bookkeeping historical choices and make ones that don't follow patterns. We are wired to make and follow patterns. Machines are much better, but they certainly don't have more/any free will.

There is actually a large philosophical debate on the relationship between determinism and free will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

Most arguments about free will are arguments about a definition. If you taboo "free will", and let the discussion continue, it turns into much more tractable discussions about determinism, neurology, and control or lack there of.

> Is there a difference between non-determinism and a free will choice? The latter seems to be a contradiction. A choice implies a reason which would be a cause, thus determinism.

So many technical (read: narrowly educated) people make philosophical arguments that just boil down to an incredulous stance.

The core of most confusion in the "free will" philosophical debates is that the "free will" concept is undefined, and people assume many different unspoken such definitions when debating it.

That was Hume's position, but we're still arguing even after he set out his definitions. :-)

Dennett did better, IMO, in "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting"

I assume they used "free will" in the title because the student who did the best in the original test, when asked how they did it, said they just used their free will. I assume nobody involved—either the author of the linked page, or Scott Aaronson—believe that this simple game disproves free will by itself (whatever they believe about it in general).

Did you press any keys aside from 'd' and 'f'? If you haven't then they've won.

Examining the code, my first thought was to throw it a de Bruijn sequence[1]: a cyclic sequence of length 2^n that contains every string of length n as a subsequence. It should (and does) learn a length-32 de Bruijn sequence after only a couple of repeats, but performs miserably on a length-64 sequence.

With a little (computer-)elbow grease, one can find a sequence with perfectly free will. After a short time, it starts repeating every... that's right, 64 characters. So of course, we want to find the shortest possible prefix.

  ddddddfdddddffddddfffdddfdfdddff
  ffddfddfdffddffdfddfffffdfdfdfff
  dffdffffffffdffffffdffffddffffff
  dfdfffdffdffffddfffdfdfffdddffff
  ffdffdffffddfdffddffdfddfffdfdfd
  fffdddffdffdfddffddfdffddddfffff
  fdffffddfffdfdfdfffdddfdfdddffdf
  fdfddfddffddfdffddddfdfdfdddfddf
  dddddffffffdffffddfffdfdfffdddff
  dffdfddffddfdffddddfdfdfdddfddfd
  etc.

Note that the last two lines are a de Bruijn sequence. Repeat those until you get bored. That's how you exercise your free will.

There is a deterministic bias: when in doubt, the page guesses "f". If it flipped a coin instead, a few experiments show that the greedy algorithm I and omoikane use cannot beat 25% for long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence

I fail to see how it's related to free will.

I can look at the digits of PI and press d and f depending it's odd or even. So what does it prove? Nothing. Being able to beat this algorithm doesn't mean that I have free will, and choose to fall into patterns (knowing the PI solution exists) doesn't mean I don't.

It’s explained on the linked site that the free will comment is a joke.

It seems that it tests both free will and sense of humor.

If the sequence is from an external source or reference, then the individual key presses are not a result of your free choices.

He's free to copy who/whatever he pleases.

Of course, but if I do a marathon on a scooter am I really doing a marathon?

If your behaviour can be predicted then you don't have free will.

Obviously you can argue whether this really predicts human behaviour or even the above implication itself (for example I think compatibilism kinda disagrees with it) but I'd say it is related.

Is it true?

From my point of view, that someone can predict what I will do from past behavior does not imply I don't have a free will.

Only way that would prove I don't have a free will is someone who would predict my behavior without knowing anything about my past, like a fortune teller that would tell my friend (because if fortune teller tells it to me it might be self fulfilling prophecy :D) something I would do; without having any interaction with me.

I think it is true. If something could predict all your actions with 100% certainty then you have no free will - you have no ability to decide for a different outcome than the one that is predetermined.

Although if it wasn't like that and you could do truly random decisions, I'm not sure what that says about your free will either.

If I had to guess, I don't think I have a free will. In my opinion my actions are a deterministic function of the state of my mind (including memory, personality) + input. I have no choice in the matter, only an illusion of one.

Unless you decide to act irrationally at some point, and at others you act rationally, and switch back and forth using a coin flip.

The prediction machine in the though experiment would make the prediction after it knows the result of the coin flip and before the action is done by the subject.

> In my opinion my actions are a deterministic function of the state of my mind (including memory, personality) + input. I have no choice in the matter, only an illusion of one

It's important to note that as far as materialist physics goes, "you" are literally "your state of mind (including memory, personality) and input". The fact that this system (i.e. "you") produces an apparently deterministic result doesn't mean that "you" didn't do it.

The common confusion comes from the fact that systems cannot in general predict their own outputs without going through the required computational process. I think it's related to the concept of "computational irreducibility". So "you" as a system needs to go through the set of motions to figure out what you eventually decide to do. Before the deliberation you can't predict the result, and thus it "feels as if" "free will" is a messy indeterministic process. But that's not a given.

Weird things happen when some other system can predict "you". The problem there is that if "you" can be simulated, you don't know which "you" is "real". But the mere fact that your state of mind and inputs will deterministically produce decisions doesn't mean "you" don't have a choice. In fact it is opposite -- "you" do have a choice, and _only_ the system "you" makes the choice (and thus it is determined solely by "you", hence, deterministic!)

I think that is exactly my stance. You are a system that is complex, iterative, and chaotic (in the mathematical sense). You are probably deterministic, but the only way you can be accurately predicted is by simulating your entire brain and sensory experience, along with memories, to the degree it's no longer a simulation; it's just building a copy. At that point, it's not a prediction; it's creating a copy of you and seeing what they would do.

I'd add that the devil is in the details of the "copy".

To accurately simulate/copy the "sensory experience", you'll have to simulate/copy the entire "observable universe" of the person. Unless you just want to predict the behavior of a person locked inside a solitary, dark, sensory deprived room, the practical implication is that you need to simulate/copy the entire observable universe to run an accurate simulation/copy.

And that's not very feasible.

Which is why I always tune out when Laplace's demon is brought up. Granting such an obviously impossible premise means all kinds of insane/wrong conclusions can pop out the other end.

So time travel deletes free will from the universe rather than just providing better information to the oracle?

Does a family member knowing you well deprive you of freedom of choice?

> I think it is true. If something could predict all your actions with 100% certainty then you have no free will

No, it's not true. Read up on Compatibilism for a definition of free will that's compatible with determinism.

For everyone who wants to find out how old their take on free will is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Compatibilism

There's admittedly a relationship, but it's very subtle and nuanced.

For example, you can predict that I'm going to pay my rent with > 90% accuracy, but that has nothing to do with whether I'm paying out of my free will or not.

A Marxist will argue that it's the oppression of the bourgeoisie that makes me pay, and a free market capitalist would counter that I made the choice "freely". But the truth is somewhere in between, and probably depends "subjectively" on how the person "feels" about doing it.

Of course if the prediction for all actions (not merely within an experimental setting) is close to 100% then there's probably something weird about it, but I don't think that's remotely possible. Not with current tech, and unlikely with future tech either.

It's a simple example that defeats a naive adversary trying to prove their free will.

It's easy to create a more complex example to defeat a more advanced adversary. (Many exist.)

It doesn't actually, if it goes lower than 100% it means the prediction failed already.

It got less than half right, so worse than just guessing.

Observation- predicting learned habits and other cognitive-effort preserving strategies your brain uses are not a refutation of free will. The whole point of habits, as Marvin Minsky pointed out in Society of Mind, is to save us from having to think through every little decision, i.e. to make ourselves predictable and unburden ourselves from decisions.

So in this instance, performing "randomly" in a low-stakes event is likely to reflexively trigger off a strategy in the brain which avails itself of some emergent pattern which serves the purpose of reducing cognitive effort. Call this test-taker strategy 1, i.e. just stab at the keys "randomly".

Another approach for the test-taker, call it strategy 2, is to expend considerable cognitive effort trying to model the machine's own model of the test taker's emerging behavior by observing the machine's responses, and then out fox it. (HN is great b/c I know everyone followed that). That's what I did, but it took real effort. Pretty soon, I wanted to drop the heavy thing and just go back to strategy 1.

IMHO the underlying assumption, that this is a test of "free will", is just flawed. Most people will enact strategy 1, be predictable and "lose".

predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: f predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: d, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: f predicted: f, observed: f predicted: f, observed: f predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: d predicted: f, observed: f predicted: f, observed: f

It's impossible to prove that free will does not exist. I could be losing on purpose.

However, what the game does is refute a particular attempt to prove that will does exist.

I don't see how.

I think it's closer to an attempted refutation of a strawman.

As one who leans towards belief in free will and also towards compatibilism, and more importantly originates from a culture with a shared belief in free will (conservative Christian evangelicalism), I don't think anyone I've known who believed in it meant "I believe my actions are fundamentally unpredictable."

I think they just meant that they genuinely have an ability to choose between the options they perceive, and then to attempt to enact that choice.

Yep I got it about 50%.

I think the framing of this experiment is bad.

It is actually about challenging the user to come up with a random sequence, which is pretty difficult without a coin to flip, an irrational number to copy, etc.

When I just "randomly" mash the keys, the prediction rate is around 70%. I have to intentionally focus to avoid patterns as much as I can and then I'm able to pull it down to 54%.

Dan Ariely[1] did a similar spiel when teaching according to his book. He asked half of class to flip a coin and write down the sequence. The other half was supposed to write down a random sequence without the coin flips. Then he collected the papers, read them out and he claims he was able to tell almost every student whether they did the real coin flips or just simulated ones.

[1] - yes, his papers were retracted because he manipulated data

I managed to keep it below 45% without any real thought for inputs greater than 100 keystrokes. The biggest problem humans have with randomness is that they underestimate the possibility of long runs (they are rare but not that rare).

How do you do long runs without any real thought?

Mobile users dont have any free will I guess.

This feels more true than it should.

"Hacker's Keyboard" was supposed to let you pull up the keyboard anywhere but some system update broke it. I got around it with Teamviewer to my desktop.

Apparently someone hasn't been reading their user agreements very closely, have they?

They are slaves to the machine.

I feel like there's an "aesthetic" to randomness, which I see in examples of Japanese wabi sabi. I don't know how to describe what that looks like in keypresses exactly, but if I imitate that, I'm able to keep the rolling average at <52% over a few hundred keypresses done with my eyes closed. I hit 51% three times in a row.

I question the relation to free will however--will seems more related to preference than randomness to me, and a better example of that would be something like "I prefer the f key". Conflating randomness with free will has always seemed like a weak attempt to argue for the existence of free will to me.

Maybe I've just seen way too many random sequences, but I was able to hold it around 40% for a while. True randomness tends to generate sequences that are slightly "uncomfortable" or "inhuman" -- I can't think of a better way to describe it. So I just kept trying to generate the least-comfortable sequences I could think of, and it worked alright. There should be a lot more long runs than you'd imagine.

Welllll... if you were holding it at 40% you were actually not random, you were doing the opposite of the model.

It sounds like the only way to "beat" this is to try to find some unrelated feed of noise to base the key presses on. Because when you actually do think about it deliberately, you fall into a pattern.

One way to do this without an external data source might be to just visualize (or look at) each object in turn clockwise of a room you are familiar with. Or use any other random source of data. Then come up with a rule that applies about half the time to some objects and half to the other. Or rather, come up with the rule before thinking of the room.

Maybe count the number of letters in the name of the object. If it's even, hit the f key, and if odd, hit d.

Granted, I only tested this for a few minutes, but I found that if I thought about "repeat" vs "switch" instead of "d" vs "f", then I could reliably get under 50% prediction. Sure, the prediction rate was high 40's, but that at least means I won!

A lot of it comes down to avoiding auto-piloting into a 50/50 distribution. Subconsciously, "random" means approaches 50/50 since that's how it works, right? I'm sure given enough time, it'll be able to predict me with >50% accuracy, but that's entirely okay. Random doesn't have to be fairly distributed. As long as it doesn't get to 100% then I still have personhood :^)

50% is random, though. 40% means it's right the other way.

I used my free will. I chose to not do it.

Was that really free will, or were you destined to not do it?

Fate decided that the website doesn't work on mobile phones.

Whee, I did pretty well against it, managed to be at around 30%. https://imgur.com/a/GmaE45k

(And no, I didn't write a Perl script, or have multiple goes to game the score, I just “tried not to do what I thought it'd think I'd do”.)

I also got under 50%, started out with 10% actually, which finally went to 36%. But I feel like it's just because I threw in many of single keys in a row there.

That's what you need to do. Most people think streaks are unlikely, which biases people to void even small streaks. The algorithm expects that, so to fool the algorithm initially, you need to tilt towards streaks, and then when begins to pick up on that, tilt away.

Fun experiment.

More importantly I can use my free will to stop engaging with it and go back to doing something productive.

My 2c:

Regardless of philosophy, free will is something you can have.

One must fight for it,but I think it is worth the fight.

The question is never if we have free will or not. The question is if we are in a state where free will is available or not.

For example, when I’m aware that there is space around myself, then I’m also aware that there are thoughts, feeling in the body, breath etc. In this state, I believe, it’s possible to choose. In this test I can choose the only press the other key and this algorithm doesn’t do so well.

Then something triggers my attention, I react, I forget that there is space, breath, thoughts etc. and I start to execute my conditioning, which is highly predictable and free will simply isn’t available at that point.

Then eventually something pulls me back to the presence, awareness. I remember there is space, breath, mind, feelings, emotions. I’m home. I’m free.

The universe led up to this moment where you fool yourself into thinking you have free will just cause you sat still for a bit. Doesn't mean much.

Think about it, if the universe is all predetermined, how peaceful your mental state is or isn't has no impact on it. We all either have free will or not, but breathing deep isn't gonna trigger it.

Free will is any random process with an asymptotically infinite number of degrees of freedom, by definition.

Are humans such a process?

Who knows, but attempts to model individual humans have certainly failed before. (We need lots of humans in aggregate to successfully model them, once the central limit theorem starts working.)

I challenge you to get any more than a single digit percent of any representative sample of people to agree a random process is free will by definition. It's one of exceedingly few definitions I've heard in decades of discussing the subject that I'll agree doesn't immediately make free will impossible, but at the same time it's one that too me at least exemplifies something that is neither free nor will.

If you want to talk about "free will" rigorously, you need to consider the human being as a random process.

No, I don't. I can reject the notion of free will on the basis that I would never consider a "random process" either "free" nor an expression of "will".

When you say "you fool yourself" then I have to admit that I don't know who am I or how I could define myself anyways. I have been sitting with that question every day for about 12 years now.

Only reason you believe there is a mind is because the mind says it exists. But have you investigated where is that mind and who is that which mind if speaking to?

The thing is for this discussion, analysis of the ego and the role of "the mind" or however you want to call it, I simply don't think it matters for the question of free will. It's one of causality at the beginning of the universe for me. The mechanism through which humans would drive their thought process or behavior is besides the point if the cause is the initial state of the universe and how all the particles and forces interact from that point onwards. A rock on the ground's "life" (path through universe) would be as predetermined as ours, it wouldn't change it if the rock had thoughts or an ego.

The discussion about the ego and "the mind" and the "who you are" in that sense are then still useful for the human to feel comfortable in feeling like they have agency, and I am aware of Buddhist philosophy in finding peace through detaching from our inner voice and gaining wisdom from not letting ourselves being driven purely by what we think we are or "what the ego says we are", but I think it's besides the point in this context (but very useful to include in a balanced "diet of thoughts").

Maybe the ego is an evolutionary defence against nihilistic traits so we all don't kill ourselves by realising none of what we do is any agency and it's all predetermined by the start of the universe. But anyway this part of the discussion enters into a rabbithole detached from the core discussion of there being free will or not, at least to me, because I cannot accept that a core property of the system "universe" and the definition of it's causality or not could depend on the thought process that goes through minds of humans in some remote part of that very universe. A detail about the higher level thought process of some "blobs of particles" in the universe don't define the way the universe itself works. Our relationship to the self doesn't have anything to do with physical reality of if-this-then-that. In other words the causality doesn't care what we think of it, it's either all pre-determined or not, our opinion doesn't matter.

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/06/07

Well you either do something because you are forced to or because you want to. You don't control either.

There are always more than two choices.

Want to and forced to pretty much covers it.

If I ask you to choose A or B, and let you take as long as you want to make this decision, at the point where you make the decision, you still have no idea why you chose what you chose. It is ultimately mysterious to you and anyone else why you chose what you chose. If you had any reasoning, it is still mysterious why that reasoning caused you to choose what you chose and why it didn't have the opposite effect?

The impetus to choose A or B in this case arises from the dark pool of the mind, sneaks up behind you and you mistakenly identify with this decision. You simply cannot think to think what to think.

You say “if I ask you to choose” but if there is no free will then I cannot choose.

Also if there is no free will then we cannot judge anyone, no matter what they did, because they didn’t have choice.

Actually my argument is that the best evidence for free will is that the world is such a mess. Without free will we would live in perfect harmony with nature, like all the other species do. We are so free that we can even deny the existence of our freedom, hence avoid taking responsibility of our actions.

> Also if there is no free will then we cannot judge anyone, no matter what they did, because they didn’t have choice.

This doesn't make sense. If there is a rock in the middle of the road, it would make sense to remove the rock from obstructing the road. Are we "judging" the rock in this case?

OTOH, if the rock happen to cause a massive accident, it seems absurd to punish the rock and try to cause as much suffering to the rock to compensate for all the suffering it caused.

> Without free will we would live in perfect harmony with nature, like all the other species do.

Harmony how? Like all the viruses, parasites, do you know what dolphins to pufferfish? What about cannibalism? Or infant mortality in nature?

> We are so free that we can even deny the existence of our freedom, hence avoid taking responsibility of our actions.

Realizing that free will does not exist does not mean that we don't have to live life anymore. We still have to live it. What it does it remove a lot of unnecessary baggage. Is it necessary to punish a rock for falling over a person? An elephant going on a rampage? What about murder?

When you realize that murder (or whatever immoral actions) is just the totality of the universe, you can think of any bad actions as just a very complex case of a brain tumor. You wouldn't blame a person for committing homicide once we learn that they went on a rampage because they have a brain tumor. But if we know enough about the universe, we will realize that pretty much anything that a human ever do is just another complex case of a brain tumor. Why did they do what they did? Well, here's a trillion page explanation of exactly why it happened starting from the Big Bang. Does it make sense to blame them now, still?

My experience is the converse: when distracted, I assume I am the author of my thoughts, the doer of my actions, but when I really pay attention, I notice that thoughts and intentions arise unbidden.

I identify with consciousness, and the origins of these intentions is unconscious, therefore I conclude that the intentions do not originate from “me”. It’s still my action, my “choice”, my kamma, but it’s not my “free will”.

> I believe, it's possible to choose

What exactly do you mean by choose? Are you saying there are actions that have no discernable cause? That there's a state in the brain that is unrelated to the state of the brain a brief moment ago? If so, is that a type of telekinesis?

Do you believe it's all about the brain?

Yeah, I think what we experience as free will takes place mostly in what we think of as our brain pretty much by definition. We might be a brain in a vat or even a Boltzmann brain, but whatever it is, the organ that constructs our reality is a brain.

Thanks for the comments.

Yea I also like to say that if my will is truly free, it's not under anyones control.

One thing I want to add: I think will and intention is also a question of scale or perspective. Bacteria is capable of making "their own" decisions but they probably cannot dictate which direction body is going to walk.

In similar way Planet Earth is under influence of the Sun, and the Sun is under influence of larger forces of the Milky Way and so on.

You could say that every level of existence is probably under a will of some level above and maybe each level can impose their will on levels below them.

From this perspective we could say that pure awareness is beyond physical body, brain and mind, so then if you want to really will your body it must be done from the state of pure consciousness - and then the body, brain, mind must follow as they're level below.

Anyways, don't take me seriously, this just entertainment.

I remember reading Rand where she argued that free will existed solely in the decision to focus or not. When you focused, what you thought was determined by your characteristics and history; and when you didn't, the same, although not in the same way. But free choice manifested in the decision to intentionally focus attention or not.

I don't know that I agree, but thought it was interesting.

For some reason it reminds me of Dune's sandworm and how you needed to "Walk without rhythm"

Being able to generate randomness is something only nature can do so by mimicking it you blend in with it.

I tried it and I need to say that it guessing correctly between 47-53% doesn't really seem that great, considering random guesses could probably land you in the same ballpark...

You have more free will than me.

I don't really understand what's going on here. I got 52%. My 6 yo daughter got 54%. My 9 yo daughter got 53%. What are people doing who are getting much higher scores?

I think they type less randomly and stick to some repeating patterns.

It's easy to get 50% by flipping a coin or rolling a die. Choosing to use this method is an example of free will overcoming determinism.

As far as why humans are natural pattern-generators, music is illustrative. If timing and frequency are random, that's not enjoyable music. Probably has something to do with resonance and the fundamentals of neuron biochemistry, e.g. the neuronal recharge time after firing, etc. This seems to be a general feature of evolution, look at squid color patterns or reproductive timing in algae and so on. It's probably a fundamental feature of all living systems, and could be linked to astronomical phenomenon, orbital parameters and light/dark cycles, and even down to subatomic processes, in which oscillation is always going on - but at this level, true randomness seems to exist in various processes like the timing of nuclear decays in a sample of matter. This inherent randomness at the root of everything seems quite real - hence, free will exists. I guess.

Something about the feedback of being able to see when it was guessing wrong made me beat way more often than 50%, just by mixing it up or being a little unpredictable when I thought it was going to catch on to me or guessed a few in a row. I was consistently in the 20-30% for a large amount of guesses.

But when I started trying to type random keys as fast as possible it started getting a lot more right.

I wonder... If you don't have access to randomness, e.g., you need to base your choice off some fixed program, and with some limited program length, in theory a perfect observer should be able to guess with certainty your next choices after some time, since there's only a fixed number of possible programs?

Of course this isn't of much practical use...

Yes, the possible programs are enumerable, and you can start searching with the least complex programs and work your way up in complexity. Once you find a program that explains the available data, you cannot guarantee it will continue to explain possible future data, unless, like you mention, you constrain the program space to a finite set. What you're describing is generally how people make models of the external world.

Yes, and this is actually a challenge in cryptography; a random number generator relies on 'random' inputs to work properly, e.g. keyboard / mouse inputs, time of day, random electricity noise, lava lamps (https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-produ...).

If these inputs or parts thereof are predictable, randomness decreases, making the cryptography ultimately weaker.

This doesn't work on mobile.

Free will and self-determination are not the same thing. Free will means the consequences and outcomes you face can be tracked back to decisions you made. Everything can be pre-destined at a level that transcends time and space as we understand it, and you can still have free will.

Imagine starting a program you wrote, you know exactly what it will do given you already know the exact parameters of it's execution environment and inputs. If the program has free will, it means that it will make decisions without those decisions being hard coded into it. In other words, its decision making is free from the will of the programmer or other programs, however, the environment, what other programs do and how the programmer adapts to the program's decision will affect the outcome. The programmer, being outside of the software reality the program is facing is able to know what free will decisions will be made and pre-plan all things accordingly.

To put it a bit diffrently, this measurement and people in general confuse free will with controllable outcomes. Free will does not mean you have any control over outcomes or that your decisions cannot and have not already been predicted and known. It just means that you are allowed to make decisions based on certain input and environemnt. In a moral context, this is relevant because you get held responsible for or credited for decisions you make. Your will is free because despite outside influence or even coercion you still get a choice, even if your choice in the end had no effect on anything, you were allowed to make it anyways. If your will isn't free, you would be a mere processor executing instructions, processing decisions that were already made by others.

Either your will is free, your will is not free and you are an agent of soemone else's will or some might say it's all randomness (a concept incompatible with our knowledge of causal reality).

Your definition of free will is a compatibilist one, and a lot of people reacts strongly negatively to compatibilist definitions when you turn explain that in a deterministic universe they are compatible with you not actually being able to make a different choice if we "rewound time".

To me, a compatibilist "free will" is not free - it's an illusion. Being aware the "free" part of compatibilist free will is an illusion is important, because it has major moral implications.

E.g. if people could not have acted differently than they have, then ascribing responsibility to people for their actions can reasonably be considered immoral.

Your last paragraph is assuming there is agency to start with, something which is not a given, and so the argument is not logically valid as stated.

I think the critical thing you and I disagree with is how you think chance and randomness exist, there is no proof that they do, everything has a cause. There is no rewinding of time. You and I are experiencing time one reality clockrate at a time and our minds refuse to contemplate reality beyond time as we know it, that's why infinity is a difficult to grasp concept for us.

You couldn't have made a different decision, but it was still your decision. It is because you assumed that your decisions control all outcomes that you feel deluded. Or you assumed your decisions can't be predicted.

Let me give you an example: A man wantes to kill himself so he took cyanide but it just so happens, a car ran into his house by accident and found him in time, then after recovery he shoots himself in the mouth directly to the brain with a shotgun but in the last second his neighbor made a loud sound that startled him and he ended up shooting half of his face off instead, he recovered from that and jumped off a building but he landed on a car and somehow he broke a lot of bones but was still alive, he crawled out his hospital bed after a few years, he hanged himself but the rope wasn't thr right length, he broke his neck and the rope snapped, he spent many decades paralyzed on a hospital bed.

Now that man had free will to make the decision about killing himself but the outcome is that in each case he failed because his destiny of be a paralytic was planned around his decisions to attempt suicide. In no way was his free will an illusion? he was allowed to make the decision and act on it but whether or not things go as he planned is what he does not control.

A less morbid example: I want to get tacos and head over to my regular taqueria but they happen to be closed due to a plumbing emergency, so I head over to mcdonalds instead. I made a free will decision to get tacos but the fact that I couldn't doesn't mean I don't have free will. Now, if the persons who own the taqueria and mcdonalds predicted beforehand that I will attempt to get tacos this morning and orchestrated a fake plumbing emergency, knowing with certainty that I will go to mcdonalds, does that mean my will was any less free? No. Because my ability to control outcomes is what I don't have, I was still able to make that decision to get tacos. Now, if those business owners brainwash me to a point where they can control my decision to get tacos or mcdonalds, then I would have lost free will because it isn't outcomes but my decision making process that is being controlled.

What makes you feel deluded is you now have to face the fact that you are not in control of your outcome, but only of your decisions. Concepts like justice would not need to exist if everyone controlled their own outcomes.

Step back to the begining, did you decide to be born or to exist? If you couldn't even control that, why did you presume you could control any outcome? You can make decisions and hopefully most of the time the outcome goes your way but at what point between birth and adulthood did you suddenly gain control of your destiny?

I wish more people can read this but therein is the difference between fate and destiny. Destiny is the outcome you can't control, fate is that same outcome but connected to specific decisions you and others made. In my first example, becoming a paralytic was his destiny, his excercise of free will to attempt suicides is the cause of his tragic paralytic fate (and I hope my morbid example scared someone off lol).

> how you think chance and randomness exist, there is no proof that they do, everything has a cause.

I don't assume they do, but it is irrelevant to my argument whether they do or not.

> There is no rewinding of time.

Firstly, we do not know this. We do not, in fact know that time passes at all. We have no ability to perceive time other than as a function of memory we do not know whether is real.

But that too is irrelevant to my argument - you're taking it to literally.

It is a shortcut to make am argument about whether the same entity with the same exact state processing the same inputs can produce a different outcome. Making that argument was both in part a rejection of randomness but more critically a rejection of agency: It's an argument that if nothing can change if you can repeat the same inputs to world with the same state, there can be nothing "free" about that process, nor any expression of "will", thus no agency, and that in such a system "free will" is at most an illusion.

> You and I are experiencing time one reality clockrate at a time and our minds refuse to contemplate reality beyond time as we know it, that's why infinity is a difficult to grasp concept for us.

We have no evidence either for or against the passage of time, and we can't have without "outside knowledge" of the system we're within. But that's a digression. We can postulate the passage of time. It does not have any bearing on the argument either way.

> You couldn't have made a different decision, but it was still your decision.

It was "my decision" the same way that was a programs "decision" to produce a given output instead of another based on its state and input. This is - as I said - a compatibilist argument, and one most people get rather agitatedly insistent isn't how things are once you go into the details. People really don't like the notion that they have no agency.

This is why I'm arguing that on one hand "compatibilist free will" is an unsatisfactory illusion, and that one the other hand free will with the agency most people believes that implies is utter nonsense.

To make it clear to you as you have clearly misunderstood my point: Free will is nonsense. Compatibilist free will is nothing more than trying to paper over that by playing silly semantic games that does not imply there's anything "free" about anything, and so I consider it an illusion. And a harmful one at that, because it makes people imagine something very different.

> It is because you assumed that your decisions control all outcomes that you feel deluded. Or you assumed your decisions can't be predicted.

No, I assume my "decisions" are all deterministic or at most stochastic in a way I have no agency over whatsoever and I consider the notion there's anything "free" about it absolutely ludicrous.

Whether or not they can be predicted is entirely orthogonal to that.

> In no way was his free will an illusion?

It was 100% an illusion in that given the same inputs and the exact same state, all we know suggests that cause and effect would either - if you assume randomness ultimately is deterministic at some level - be entirely deterministic - or a stochastic combination of deterministic and randomness.

No possible example you can give addresses that fundamental issue: There is no known logical cause of decisions that isn't either a deterministic cause-and-effect link or randomness, or a combination of the two. Without that there is no agency, and we are nothing more than automatons.

To be clear: I am arguing we are nothing more than automatons.

(Find a "third logical cause" and you'd be up for the Nobel in both physics and maths)

> why did you presume you could control any outcome

I don't presume anyone can control any outcome. That was my point. Hence arguing that a compatibilist "free will" is nothing but an illusion.

> his excercise of free will to attempt suicides is the cause of his tragic paralytic fate

And I'm saying that "free will" is pure illusion. Nothing you have described suggests any source of decision-making other than deterministic cause and effect - you have yourself ruled out randomness. There's nothing "free" about it.

To reiterate, your version of "free will" has a name: It's a compatibilist view. It's well trod philosophical ground.

Words are defined by use, so you're entirely free (heh, sorry) to use "free will" to refer to that, but my argument is that while superficially a lot of people will nod along to that, the moment you explain the implication - that they couldn't possibly have done things differently, people tend to have a strong negative reaction to it.

People want to think they have agency, and with compatibilist free will does not provide that. That does categorically not mean I think free will with agency exists - it means I think using the term "free will" about "compatibilist free will" is wildly misleading.

Compatibilists, cling to this use of "free will" because it is the only way of getting to a definition of "free will" that gives even the superficial illusion of free will without being full of logical holes. "Compatibilist free will" does explain our perception of having free will.

My point is that calling it free will is at best a misnomer, and one that is harmful because the failure to accept that it is an illusion causes people to cling to moral arguments that are wildly invalid without actual agency and actually free "free will".

E.g. without agency any punishment of criminals not designed to minimise harm to all of society including the criminals themselves becomes far harder to justify.

Holding on to this flawed fiction of free will is drastically keeping society in an utterly barbaric, immoral state.

Robert Sapolsky has a new book on free will, Determined[0], and he's doing lots of podcasts[1] about it. I started with Origins[2].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Determined-Science-Life-without-Free/... [1] https://www.listennotes.com/search/?q=robert%20sapolsky&sort... [2] https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-origins/robert-sapo...

From a comment in a previous similar project (I can't find it now), an easy method to defeat the predictor is to use 4 keys instead of 2. Instead of d and f, press s, d, f and e. The other keys are ignored by the program but the create enough confusion in your finger to make a more random sequence.

I believe that if you ask people to actually toss a coin 100 times, vs make up 100 tosses, it's very easy to know who made it up. Humans will not like to do HHHHHH for example, even though you'd expect a sequence of 6 to come up etc.

Really like the website, I'm a fan on these minimal websites

Does this prediction work well for others? For me it hovers between 48-51% so basically a coin flip...

An excellent and freaky 2.5 page short story in Nature on a very similar theme. If you have the time, enjoy:

https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a

After reading how it works, I can get to around 50% by doing the following: pick a pattern of f's and d's of length between 1-5. Type that pattern. Pause for a second or two. Then change the pattern. Patterns can be, for example: only d's four times; alternate between f and d three times; single f; one f for every two d's two times.

In fact, now that I "get it", I don't even need to consciously pick a specific pattern, I just smash the buttons and "somehow" change the way I smash them every five or so smashes. I get around 50% prediction rate pretty consistently with this.

Replying to my own comment with another method to get a low prediction rate: pick a song or a beat and drum the buttons to the tune of that song (how you map more than two different sounds to just two buttons is up to you).

I hammered away for a while and the program was always around 50%. I wanted to be surprised at how accurate the prediction was but I simply felt let down. Funny how that works

i was hammering at 18% and I felt like a failure

It got more than half wrong, so worse than chance :

Observation- acqhabits

I was consistantly able to get it to be at or near 50% for long periods simply by typing English sentences in morse code, "f" for dot and "g" for dash

Nice. I don't even know Morse code, but simply pretending to code in some letters (saying "dit" and "dah" in my head) worked.

I chose not to press a key, but may change my mind at some random nexus in the future. Thus, we are at an stalemate for now, as the input event is yet to be observed. =)

I've long been very curious how one would generate a reasonably good source of randomness in a practical way without using a computer. Perhaps one could think of a song and then try to deduce randomness from the first letter of each word. I haven't found a way yet, any ideas?

I occasionally want to use a reasonably good source of randomness when e.g. picking a board-game player or picking a random item on a menu.

Ask a friend to pick a number (unbounded). They usually give something in the thousands or ten thousands. Whatever number they give you, divide it by the number of choices and take the remainder. Mod 2, mod 3, mod 4, mod 5, and mod 6 are pretty easy to do in your head.

Just confirmed that my brain is much worse at producing randomness than python's random module. The site predicted my own "random" key strokes with ~67% accuracy. It was able to predict the output of a trivial python program that chose randomly between 'f' and 'd' with only 53% accuracy, and that probably would have converged to 50% with a larger sample.

If you understand how this works, the result of the game becomes invalid.

Imagine, you're a complicated machine implemented in Game of Life. The game is another not so complicated machine in Game of Life and you start exchanging messages. As soon as you understand how the game works, you can simulate the internal state in your mind. This way, you can reach any score you like. So the result becomes invalid.

We are creatures of habit. We have biases (read: short cuts), because it's too expensive* to recalculate every decision from scratch everytime. Many decisions are influenced, but that doesn't mean we can't override such paths if necessary, or that they might evolve over time as outcomes change.

* Think: fight or flight. Slow to decide flight could lead to death.

Page & Neuringer (1985) showed that you could teach pigeons to be more variable. The discussion around that phenomenon has similar branches: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3501427/

More recent review: A Critical Review of the Support for Variability as an Operant Dimension https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33024930/

Initially I was getting around 40-50% - after so many clicks it would start to tick up to 55% and hold fairly regularly.

I could of course influence my patterns but I could also tell I was re-using some patterns, and getting bored of varying them after around 55%. This was fairly trivial for me, but its interesting that many people can't do this (easily).

Reminds me of the "second guessing" menus that one of Ted Selker's students came up with at Media Lab (sorry I don't remember her name). It inspired me to implement the same idea with pie menus, many years ago (when JavaScript was young and XML and XSLT were cool):

JavaScript Pie Menus

https://youtu.be/R5k4gJK-aWw?t=255

Transcript:

This was inspired by some research at MIT Media Lab.

This is a demonstration of pie menus that guess what your second choice would be.

When I click up [a pie menu], it allows me to select my favorite color.

Let me zoom in here. Well I think it's blue [point at blue]. No, red [point at red]! Ok.

So it says: "I think your favorite color is red, but your second favorite color is blue."

And that's based on the fact that when I popped it up, even though I [finally] selected red, I spend the most time selecting [pointing at] blue.

People tend to browse the pie menus like this, looking at things, and when they find what they like, they'll click it.

But then they'll pause to consider things.

So I can click up the menu, and go [point at] yellow, oh no, I'll just cancel it.

And now it's guessing my favorite color is yellow, even though I didn't select one.

This is a really simple elegant idea that I applied to pie menus, and it can be applied to a lot of other things, like e-commerce, or art galleries, or whatever.

I wrote more about it earlier in a response to a question about exploratory pointing (what I call "browsing" and "reselection"):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17123091

pvg on May 22, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]

Although, since you're on the line, I have a question about your last post. In all the research and measurement that's gone into pie menus, have people looked into 'exploratory pointing' in pie menus? It's very common when looking through a linear menu with a mouse (many people also do it with text selection while reading) but it's super clunky and jittery in the actual pie menus I've seen in the wild.

[...]

I got down to 0% on my first try... I'm afraid I don't get it :D I typed dddfdddfdffffddddddf

Not sure what the percentages mean. It predicted 6 keys correctly and 14 incorrectly.

Hm after pressing some more it suddenly increases to 30% while the ratio of hits and misses hasn't really changed. Perhaps the calculation is somewhat buggy?

I wonder what would happen if you used this to buy stocks.

I've actually been looking for this or something similar for years now, because I remember seeing and playing with it on HN, but I was never able to find it again. Thank you for posting it!

This is one of the best things I've read on the internet in a minute. It's a modern Koan.

Just use your freewill.

Delightful.

I had an accuracy of around 35%. I closed my eyes, didn't think at all, and just smashed both keys as fast as I could. When I opened my eyes and started to think about how I could get it lower, the accuracy in predictions actually increased.

I run emacs for months under screen, and whenever I need a temporary buffer I generate a randomly named one by going ^X B aksjdlasjd, and half the time there's already a buffer with that name full of old text!

Will is a tree structure. Things that act due to the design or machinations of known forces are not free will. The computer, sophisticated though it may be, does all it does because the programmer wills it so. The things you are paid to do for your job are not your free will but rather the will of your employer. Whatever compulsory force lies one node above in the cause and effect tree, that's the thing whose will is being exerted. When we can't see any higher than a given node, we are left with a free-floating will (aka a free will). It may not actually be free in a deterministic universe, but since it is impossible to traverse the tree ad infinitum, it is a useful fiction to have a cutoff point and call whatever node you made it to "free".

My opinion is that if you have a set of everything that exists and another set of everything that doesn't exist, you won't find free will in any of them.

I tried this with a coin and it fails to predict the coin in significantly more often than 50% events. What about human can not generate sequences of a decent randomness I knew since a Statistics course.

..around 43% in several, not-so-short runs.

Does going below 50% make me more human? ;) xDxD

Superhuman, actually.

What makes free will free? Dd we mean free from the laws of thermodynamics? I don't understand how free will can be regarded as anything other than a religious belief or superstition.

The true test of free will is how long you spend on the site at all?

Maybe I have free will?... was consistently hovering just under 50%

I got it down to 43%. I had my eyes closed most of the time, only opened them twice; saw a 57% and a 43%.

Careful. If you get significantly below 50%, then you could be predicted by the negation of this algorithm. To truly beat it, I think you want to be right around 50%.

I can keep it quite consistently at ~45%, by changing my pattern.

I constantly get 55%-ish rate. This is close to random guessing.

Take digits of pi, press 'd' if the digit is < 5, and else press 'f'.

Now, what would be the prediction rate?

Does it mean that the sequence was found to be created with free will? :)

100%, I just alternated "f" & "d".

Make sure to blacklist the site in your given vim browser plugin if you're like me and immediately mashed the 'd' key and closed the tab.

This reminds me of a programming assignment we had in college -- you had to write a rock paper scissor bot that went up against other students.

I don't personally believe in free will, but I got a shockingly low prediction rate given it ought to be around 50%.

Highest it got to was 25% briefly.

A choice between two is not a reflection of free will. Impress me more when you can get 60 percent across all keys on the keyboard.

I sat in a cafe overlooking a busy street, and pressed f when a man walked by and d when a woman walked by, and got 51%.

"I" flipped a coin and pressed the keys accordingly.

Whatever this particular "I" is, does it have "free will"?

I was at 54% my first try by basically alternating between 10 fs, then 10 ds, then back and forth 3-5 times, then repeat.

33% for me. I did try to intentionally "fool" it, but still kinda disappointing it was so easy.

If you predict what they will predict and do the opposite is that perfect free will or the opposite?

I did use my free will. I refused to walk into your trap by refusing to follow your link.

what would be the statistically optimal model for this problem? the author is using a simply 5-gram prediction model. makes me wonder if some kind of hidden markov model would be optimal for this problem but not sure how exactly.

thoughts from anyone proficient in statistics?

I could get it down to ~51/53% by hammering the keys. I think that is pretty good.

just using fingers from both hand and looking away from screen brings it down to 50%.

me too. using two hands seems pretty random enough.

Hovers around 50% for me. So it's no better than a random guess it seems.

i started pressing and eventually it showed 0%. At this moment i knew i beat the machine because i was free to stop. There is part of free will in the amount of data you wanna give too :)

As accurate as a coin flip. Not particularly interesting in the end.

For most people it's a bit higher than 50%. If you got it down to 50%, congratulations, you outsmarted the algorithm.

And if you get it much below 50%, congratulations, you've outsmarted yourself.

This is one of the kind of tests we can perform on an individual in the future if we suspect they are artificial. A standard human should be fairly predictable, but an artificial person is more likely to produce true random patterns when asked to type randomly.

Free will is not an event in time and space. It's like examining a program and saying there can't be a programmer because everything the program does is predetermined. Yes, but the predetermining is itself determined at another level.

I got 54% witout too much difficulty. not sure what to conclude

First try: 0% prediction accuracy. What is trying to achieve?

to show that a real free will is to stop right when you beat it :)

I can’t test it on mobile, but the last time this page made the rounds, I was able to defeat the prediction algorithm by mindlessly tapping improvised rhythms (I’m used to doing that when I’m bored).

67%. Am I a prime candidate to be replaced by AI?

Do I win because I didn't press either?

i was pressing f and j instead of f and d, and was always getting 100% and i was freaking out :)

Initially I pressed S and D and thought it was some kind of joke: Only predicting and counting the F presses, so it will always be 100% correct :)

this has nothing to do with free will, only what our intuitive idea of randomness is

Better than a flipped coin

hmm hovered around 53-54%

pretty consistently hovering between 52% and 55% for me.

heh.. interesting..

I lined my finger's up to the keys, then looked away from the screen while I just "randomly" tapped to the beat of some music I was listening to.

it still guessed 70%

Free will has nothing to do with randomness.

fffddd win. That was strangely easy. I guess I have free will, a soul, God is real, and life has meaning.

53%

Yeah I didn’t fucking play I win

The whole concept of free will is ridiculous; it implies that a person is isolated to themselves, when of course we are a soup of ecosystems inside of a soup of ecosystems.

Asking the question "do we have free will" is really just an encoded way of defending your sense of ego. Even if you answer "no, there is no free will," it still presupposes the concept of "I".

How does free will imply that a person is isolated to themselves?

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