Slashdot Mirror
Random Number Generator That Sees Into the Future
hackajar writes "Red Nova news has an interesting article about a random number generating black box that may be able to see into the future. From the article: "according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events"."
You mean I don't need to subscribe to Slashdot to see the Mysterious Future?
Then maybe it can help me to win a few more Rock Paper Scissors games too.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Or do you people not listen to Art Bell? You should. You'll learn a lot.
The psychic fiends union will hear of this, let me tell you!
/.).
Well, I'm not one of those new-fangled fortune tellers but I predict dozens of eggs screaming in terror and then suddenly silenced (by
BTW, how in the world is this NOT a "laugh, it's funny" article?
01010101011010111111000000000111110000000000000000 0000000000000000000
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
I predict a great writter will make a short story about a machine like that and Hollywood will turn it into an awful motion picture!
Parent is a troll
If it can sense future events, that would make it less random, right? To me, that almost sounds like pre-determined events (how far into the future this pre-determination is good for, you decide), so it really isn't "random".
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" --Seymour Cray
I predict that this post will hit +5 funny!!
:-(
No?
It's kinda strange when you think about it, and I'm not religious by any means, but I wouldn't discount any weird superhuman powers that can predict massic events.
Come on, MACHINES WHICH CAN SEE INTO THE FUTURE! How cool is that!
The best part is that it's just a random number generator. I wonder if you can run a regular random number generator on your PC and get the same results? Or do you need on of their rediculous "eggs"?
I have one of those too.
Michael
I like the new Slashdot that picks up stories off of Fark.
/. needs a "trivially debunked hogwash" category. This belongs with the "battery stickers" story from a few weeks ago.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Call Ben Affleck this machine must be destroyed before it causes the destruction of humanity.
It just spit out the number 42. I guess there really is something to this little black box.
>'Put it this way - we haven't yet got a machine
> we could sell to the CIA.'
Oh yeah. I'm sure you'd know, Dr. Nelson.
I don't think some scientists will be happy with having to rewrite the laws of physics yet again as a result of this...
Azh nazg durbataluk, azh nazg gimbatul, Azh nazg thrakataluk agh burzum ishi krimpatul! This sig blocked by Slashdot.
This just seems ridiculous. A normal random number generator predicting the future? Maybe Jesus was reborn into the form of a microprocessor. (Holy crap, that would be friggin' awesome!!!)
Seriously though, every single day somewhere something "amazing" happens and I don't see the black box picking up that. What about the day George Bush was re-elected? Or the day Saddam Hussein was found? Or the day I finally figured out how to make good macaroni and cheese? I think these scientists are just over-excited about an odd coincidence. So the numbers shot up a few hours before the events happen. What if they shot up a few days before? A few months before? Would they still make these claims? No, I see nothing interesting in this article no matter how hard I look. Maybe someone can convince me otherwise.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
And I suspect if we have any sort of "psychic" abilities, they may be able to affect them some of the time. Ever notice some people are cursed when it comes to computers, while others have a kind of "healing" effect on them? I know I've walked into rooms with a computer I'm supposed to fix and it's suddenly not having problems.
is this the machine Bush was using to predict terror alerts? not very accurate.
Enjoy Every Sandwich
If they can demonstrate a link between people thinking and a random number generator in a controlled environment, then they can go claim the Randi prize (randi.org)... It's a million dollars, should be worth their time.
I doubt they'll be collecting it.
Pat Niemeyer
and also read about Hillary Clinton's artificial insemination by alien beings.
I wish I could rate the actually article up as funny. It bothers me that stuff like this appears on slashdot. It must be a slow new day or something. The article isn't even written scientifically. In the words of Strongbad, "This is total crap."
don't give your editor password to crazy Uncle Larry who spent all last Christmas and Thanksgiving trying to sell family members stock in an Atlantis expeditionary company and lost all of his retirement funds to the parents of a nine year old girl whom they claimed could pick winning stocks with the powers of ESP
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For the full story and project details, go here Global Consiousness Project
Read the article and his multiple qualifications. It's not like this is some crazy guy in his basement, it's Princeton.
Elevators.
Great, Now we'll integrate this into an elevator control system and now the elevator can get to the floor your on before you actually call it. Douglas Adams.
Psychic fiends eh?
I think they prefer to be called Mindflayers.
of the total perspective vortex
I think its time to use this technology bundled with some AI and create some smart elevators to predict when we will need the elevator and be there right in time (hopefully it won't get too depressed)!
This is retarted. It's not April 1st yet, you know.
I also thought slashdot was fooled again, or at least this was a humor article.
It's not.
Red Nova appears to be a valid news site, and the Princeton University link at the bottom is the real thing, describing just what the article talked about.
You know, we all like to laugh at so called "psychic phenomena" or pseudoscience. I know, I do it too. But this is rather stunning...it's a Princeton University project, run by a group of scientists who respect the scientific method, who are trying to do their best at sounding humble while making extraordinary claims. The only question is if they actually have the data to back it up (some graphs would be nice).
Progress in science means shattering accepted theories. If this is what it seems to be, then the possibility of a scientific revolution, at the very least a whole new field of science, seems to be at hand.
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
This guy is hooking up machines using the internet, and is surprised when a deviation from normal happens during times of extreme traffic? This is no different than sideshows on Coney Island. Complete BS.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
42
Yeah tomorrow it will predict that the squirrels will take over and force us to work in their nut mines...
Can it predict when I'll get a date??
Just some folks trying to come up with an excuse for creating an RNG without much R.
Sig ?
We should ask the face on mars what his tealeaves think about this! Its a machine that produced RANDOM numbers, any pattern or 'prediction' is something you WANT to see. I bet theres patterns that says that thier getting more funding too!
Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -Pyrotic
So they have these big curves on days with major events... do they have the curves on days without major events? Are there many days without major events? Come on people, I've heard more stringent scientific methods applied on the Art Bell show than this article. Doesn't even say how the stupid random number generators work, for all we know flipping the light on in the room where the subjects are screws them up. Maybe they measure traffic at cnn.com (or ham radios back in the 70's and 80's).
And this right after the article where it's okay if you try to allocate memory at address -8134957, because a little uncertainty can be good.
Is Zonk taking his name too literally? Is this now "News for like... you know, dudes... and wow, look at the pretty colors... I can see relativity man..."
Join me in sending an e-mail to CSICOP and requesting that it investigate this supposed black box predicting the future.
Believing in superstitious quackery like this black box has serious ramifications. If enough people believed in this nonsense, then we would end up in setting national policy based on this block box. How would you like the USA to be guided by witches and warlocks?
Elevators. Yes, elevators! Oooh, I'll bet no-one else thinks of that.
I'm sure that is almost entirely BS, but still just the small chance that it does have a little bit of fact behind it makes it kind of interesting. I'd be more convinced if they published their little line graph thing that "predicts the future". Granted they could just make that up, but it kind of seems like that's what their thing is doing anyway.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
These guys just broke my bullshit meter. That's an expensive piece of equipment. I'm calling my lawyers.
spitting out enough numbers every day so that some symbolism must come out of it.
A million monkeys....
If there's one thing that's convinced me that predicting the future with certainty is REALLY hard and absurdley lucrative it's my experience with options trading. Which is kind of like regular stock trading except the risk/rewards are multiplied many times, sometimes up to an order of magnitude or more. Not something you want to do unless you have money to gamble and can sit there full time with your finger on the mouse ready to hit the sell button at a moments notice.
That's the thing. Anybody who can predict the future with certainty can just go be an options trader and become a multi-millionaire in a matter of weeks.
Perhaps they need a random number generator that sees into the future.
fark? This sounds more like an Onion story to me.
Random numbers predict the future! Unfortunately the people in charge of reading them are so far behind that they don't know what was predicted until after it happens.
Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Sorry, that's the only way to accurately describe this. Next we'll be posting stories about Noah's lost ark.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I think if you start with a pre-conceived notion of a pattern you'll start seeing it everywhere simply by the fact that you are looking for it. If you had some idea like the number 213 in your head then you would start to look for it in your environment and by looking for it would find it all over the place. This has a feedback effect as by looking for something you see it more often creating the impression that it is common when in fact, it may not be.
Shh.
Unpredictability in Future Microprocessors
Posted by Zonk on Saturday February 12, @09:27PM
Science: Random Number Generator That Sees Into the Future
Posted by Zonk on Sunday February 13, @12:43AM
from the could-be-hooey dept.
hackajar writes "Red Nova news has an interesting article about a random number generating black box that may be able to see into the future.
eh heh heh
BTW, how in the world is this NOT a "laugh, it's funny" article?
Because it's pseudo-science that's trying to be serious. Which can be a dangerous thing, although probably isn't in this case.
I stopped reading when I read this:
"The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph."
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
Similarly and extending from that, there is no law of anything that says that if you have a long series of 1's that it's more likely that your next number will be a 0. The "law of averages" is commonly cited here but there's really no such law.
Wikipedia has a nice little article that explains this, though I highly recommend the book Innumeracy for a lot more detail and an entertaining read to boot (that's a straight Amazon link, not a referral - I don't care where you buy it, just read it.)
Wow. I just dozed off there for a moment and the rest of February and March just zipped on by. I must be getting old or something...
I predict that this story will appear again on the front page of Slashdot within the next 48 hours.
Regards,
Karnak the Magnificent
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
And the mysterious black box is [drum roll...]: A Palm III
ones and zeros everywhere! and i thought i saw a two!
So, Di is killed in a car wreck, the boxes deviate from statistical norm.
Johnny Carson dies, the boxes deviate?What about when the Pope was sick?
The only proof is prediction. The Pope is old and may die soon. That is a fairly big event. So, predict what your machines will do on that day.More like "timing". The pictures pop up ever x seconds or so. People anticipate that and the reaction shows.
Get real. Showing pre-cognition should be the easiest thing in the world. Use a variant of the old "Russian Roulette" system. A box that makes a loud noise and sends a shock through the person.
The person hits a button. Maybe it hits back, maybe it doesn't.
If a person is pre-cognitive, that person's reactions SHOULD be different immediately before the hit the button depending upon whether it hits back or not.
Particularly if the hit back likelyhood is very low (1 in 100 hits) and the test runs for a few hours.
Basically, what they did is the following: They looked at the output of this device for "statistical anomalies", i.e. the .5% of the time it's output was out of the range it was expected to be in 99.5% of the time.
Then, they looked for "important events" that occurred around that time. They don't have any way of choosing them other than that they happened when this occurred.
Finally, they started looking for events *after* it happened, and found those as well. BOOM, it predicts the future.
This isn't science, it's not even Nostradamus.
These two groups better get together:
"Unpredictability in Future Microprocessors"
"Random Number Generator That Sees Into the Future"
Hmm....
I'll believe it when I see it myself.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I predict this link to the real-time GCP will not work in 10 minutes:s erver.wall.html/
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/bsktobsrv/basketob
How does it generate the numbers?
This is far more intruiging than whether or not it accurately predicts some catastrophic event is about to occur.
Black box experiments, feh.
http://angryflower.com/schrod.gif
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
will i win the lottery?
is this the end of patents?
since you can foresee the future, get prior art before something happens.
will i lose my virginity?
Anyone can stuff a midget into a box and spray paint it black. (The box, not the midget.)
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Woops, my link was removed (damn, how many years have I been posting on this site, anyway?). Here's a link to the book that should make it through.
the events of april 1st?
amen bro. I've tried my hand at options trading too. a tip by the way, don't sit there with your finger on the sell button. patience is key.
This story appears right above Unpredictability in Future Microprocessors
--- If we knew half the things we shouldn't we'd stop wishing we knew it all
I predict they will announce shenanigans and we're all going to have a good laugh.
Could what they are trying to claim, be the root cause of deja-vue? That feeling you get that you've seen or done something already when you know that you haven't. Most people will admit to have had a deja-vue felling before, but would many sane people admit to being able to see the future, or communicate through thought? Mamby there is more to our minds than we care to admit.
Ride recklessly only when safe to do so.
Ironic that this gets posted just after: "Unpredictability in Future Microprocessors"
This signature was left intentionally blank.
Geeks will appreciate that you can download the raw data from the Global Consciousness Project and analyze it yourself. They even provide you a head start in your programming with their C++ package. In addition, there is a realtime driven display coded in Java, and "data driven music."
;)
The entire premise behind the Global Consciousness Project is that the Noosphere exists, and that, when a large amount of people are focused on the same thing it effects things in ways that are difficult to measure. There are dozens of these eggs (64) all around the world returning truly random data to the princeton server, which is inside a special casing to protect it from any extraneous waves/radiation/youname it. Their data purport, and indeed seem, to show that during times when many people are focused on the same thing, this random data is suddenly "less random". This typically means that when people start hearing about a globally impacting event on the news, the data becomes less random.
Using current methods it is impossible to prove that this is what they are measuring. But the data goes to show that they are measuring something. If you don't believe me or the news article, download the data and analyze it yourself, and if you're feeling the tingling of those psychic wavelengths, you can even register a prediction of your own
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
And if you call the number at the bottom of your screen you can have it tell your future for just $5.95 for the first 3 minutes, and $2.95 for each additional minute!
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
I vote against Einstein!
"And machines like the Edinburgh black box have thrown up a tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future.
Although many would consider the project's aims to be little more than fools' gold, it has still attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations. Researchers from Princeton - where Einstein spent much of his career - work alongside scientists from universities in Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. The project is also the most rigorous and longest-running investigation ever into the potential powers of the paranormal.
'Very often paranormal phenomena evaporate if you study them for long enough,' says physicist Dick Bierman of the University of Amsterdam. 'But this is not happening with the Global Consciousness Project. The effect is real. The only dispute is about what it means.' The project has its roots in the extraordinary work of Professor Robert Jahn of Princeton University during the late 1970s. He was one of the first modern scientists to take paranormal phenomena seriously. Intrigued by such things as telepathy, telekinesis - the supposed psychic power to move objects without the use of physical force - and extrasensory perception, he was determined to study the phenomena using the most up-to-date technology available. "
Just because something sounds crazy, doesn't mean it is. People from 100 years ago, if told about MRIs, CAT scans, GeoSyncSats, GPS, Sat Phones, Computers, the Internet, and Microwave ovens would say you are crazy and such things would never be possible.
Perhaps the article should be read before people spend a whole 5 minutes trying to prove it to be a fraud.
... the same machine whose inventor appears on Coast to Coast AM from time to time? Anyone know? Sure sounds almost exactly lke it.
bash: rtfm: command not found
I for one welcome our... ah, forget it.
* OK, perhaps not the only rational explanation :)
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
In fact it accurately predicted getting slash dotted.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
In all seriousness, have they not considered that the Earth is alive? If you honestly think about it, that would answer the REG outcomes. The Earth was aware (at some level we can't fully understand) of what the terrorists of 9-11 were going to do much sooner that anyone in the USA. The spike the scientists measured could be seen as a "sigh" or "collective breath" of impending doom and gloom. Much like all the other world events the article mentions. I am part of a religion that believes the Earth is alive and will receive a paradisical glory because it has "obeyed" all the laws that would qualify it for such a reward/rest from the evilness it was had to bear.
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
I can see into the future. You will get a 5, Informative for making this obvious mathematical observation.
The USA guided by witches and warlocks at least wouldn't be much worse.
Baldur
I feel a disturbance in the force. It's as if a million random number generators cried out all at once ... and became silent.
Why don't you visit the sites mentioned in the article or easly found in a google search before you say they are a fraud?
You appear to be baseing your 'debunking' of this on a popsci level article, not the original research. Why are you being so lazy?
I would think that one could divine just about anything from a field of random data; events past, present and future will fit just fine. Seems a like the perfect machine to give you a glimpse of exactly what you want to see.
1111111111.....0 000000000000
1010101010101......
00000000000
slashdot!
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I saw some psychic fiends in that movie Scanners (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081455/)... scared the begeebus outta me.
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." --Aldo Leopold (Paraphrased)
saw into the future on that story. Like April 1st.
I predict you will go back in time and become a famous 16th century English playwright.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I can see into the future. You will get a 5, Informative for making this obvious mathematical observation.
I just want to say that the 5, Informative that I see on the grandparent now was a 2, Informative when I started typing my reply a few minutes ago.
I'm off now to generate some more random numbers, kill a princess, sink a submarine, knock down a skyscraper, and bomb Serbia. 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1.
Can anybody confirm this? I can't get my eyes to cross right hehe.
m y k a r m a i s m o r e p o s i t i v e t h a n y o u r s.
...cry out in terror and are suddenly silenced.
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
That aside, you didn't read far enough, shame on you for commenting without reading the whole article. Apparently the REGs (also called EGGs) do produce straight lines normally, or nearly straight lines. They've seen it deviate only in controlled experiments (repeatedly), and before major world events (again repeatedly). We're also not talking just one REG here, the project curently has dozens of them located worldwide, and they are seeing these spikes occur before major events in tandem -- on every device.
Besides all the scientists they spoke to in the article all said basically the same thing -- they couldn't believe it when they saw these things occur, and kept repeating the experiments and getting the same results, over and over and over. It's more than just the REG boxes, it talks about studies that have examined the brain's responses of people shown a sequence of provacative cartoons, and they'll start seeing the brain react the same before the cartoon's ever shown to them. Again, they repeated the experiments multiple times, with different people, same results.
The article also points out a true oddity, nothing in the laws of physics say it's impossible to predict the future. In fact time may not be a constant, studies have shown it can flow backwards as well as forwards. So all this could be a weird sort of subconscious tapping into that, we're remembering things that haven't happened yet. Since we understand almost nothing about the brain (in terms of how it does what it does, we're not even sure _where_ or _how_ it really stores memories) I don't see this as anything that's impossible. Frankly it may be happening, we don't know enough yet to know either way what's really going on.
But if we don't read the full article and write things off by a few paragraphs, I can guarantee you we'll never know. You know this has happened multiple times in history, how many people thought it was impossible to make an airplane to fly in they sky? How many people thought the earth was the center of the universe? If we're unwilling to read, listen and be open minded about things one day we will end up proved wrong and made to look stupid in the process. Frankly I'm willing to give this the benefit of the doubt, since I read the whole article I can tell they're being very careful to say that they don't know what's causing this, only that something is happening. They also said it's not terribly useful for predictions as it is, they can tell you something will happen when they see these spikes, but they don't know what, when or where.
For more information on REGs, here's a link to Dr. Nelson's website: http://www.princeton.edu/~rdnelson/
Consider for a moment that there exists a god. He (she or it, whatever) is basically our caretaker, maybe even our creator. Here's the deal though, nobody really knows anything about him, and I'd wager to say anyone who thinks they know anything is pretty fscking arrogant. What if (yes, this is just a theory), god doesn't really have great influential power in the universe (i.e. can't make the moon fall out of the sky in one night, or hurl the earth at the sun, etc), but can only subtly manipulate it through chaotic interactions. If this were true, wouldn't that mean patterns in chaos could very well be the face of god? It might even make fortune telling by random chance (tarot, rune casting, coin flipping, etc) legitimate. Assuming it were true and provable to be true, really it's just an interesting idea. Something like this story though, assuming it's true, makes it a bit more plausible.
One thing that would be interesting to see is if location affects these Eggs. The article mentioned the Eggs notice global events. I wonder if you put an Egg in a small town whether or not it would detect something like a murder or a natural disaster local to the town. Might be something for these guys to try.
But now I'm not sure if I really saw "joke" in the static or if I only saw it because I was looking for it.
and yes, I did RTFA.. Bullshit..
It turns out you can watch these eggs live over at the It's fascinating stuff, although it feels a bit overly dramatic. It keeps making heartbeat sounds, and whenever a statistical deviation exceeds a certain boundary it goes 'ping'.
So not only is it a website that predicts the future, it's a website that goes 'ping' that predicts the future. what more could a geek want?
I want the fire back.
in your blood-powered car
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
...require extraordinary evidence.
I'm keeping my mind open (hey, it's a big universe out there), held together by a healthy dose of skepticism and intellectual honesty.
My first thought, upon reading the RedNova article, was to wonder what the article didn't say. Am I the only one who found it rather credulous?
Maybe this is legit, but I won't be rushing out to buy a random number generator to go along with my astrology charts and I Ching anytime soon.;)
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Who knows, maybe this will be some sort of evidence of us existing in a simulated world. Perhaps one where the people running it wish to know how people perceive what everyone thinks up to a major disaster. The simulation might need to increase its recording rate of people's minds leading up the the event. Or whatever. Just a thought.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is it predicting a Slashdotting?
ok.... so this churns out (pseodo)-random numbers.... ok maybe you might want to mention how the sposivily random piece of the algorithim is picked? This would be the only place where 'human interference' could theoreticly occour...
These "scientists" clearly do not understand the harmonic perfection of simultaneous 4-way rotating Cubic Time.
Starting about 2 weeks before 9/11, I started thinking about assymetric warfare, and that because of the lopsided power of the US, that any group opposed would have little choice but to resort to terrorism if they didn't want to merely commit suicide.
In fact, about a week before 9/11, a friend said he had been to New York City, and I told him I wasn't sure I wanted to go there, because it seemed overdue for an attack.
And about 10 years prior to 9/11, I happened into a conversation about what we would do if we found ourselves on a plane that was hijacked by terrorists. We both agreed that the best course would be to fight back - if not to save ourselves, then to save others. The man I was talking to was one of the leading passengers who revolted on Flight 97.
All this is true.
And for a long time I've had a strange feeling about November 2006. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
Baldur of Asgard
Mickey: Okay box, I move my finger and you tell me when you see 'em, okay box? (brings right pointer to corner of it) :)
Box: I see it. (382738723743...ahem: 183984394 Rocky loses the decision to Apollo. Sequel imminent.)
Mickey: Impressive, kid. Now, the other one.(brings finger and jabs it at the box a couple of times. Does a Booker T spinaroonie)
Box: Nope, nope...Oh....(Rocky wins the sequel.) There it is.
Mickey: Apollo'd have smashed yer face, kid! You've got heart, but ain't got the tools anymore! Forget it!
Box: Yo, slashdottttt! (passionate tears)
If this is the case, then I must possess the exact opposite ability. I haven't won a single red cent on the lottery for years! :-(
How many other things happened that day that got lost in the confusion? Was there any significant seismic activity? Sunspots?
I don't know, I haven't investigated at all, but time running in reverse doesn't score on the "plausible" meter for me.
I'd prefer to leave it on the "remotely possible" pile for now.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Of course, it would help if they made graphs available of the average of all the "sensors". Interesting to see how many spikes there were that did not coincide with a "Disturbance in the Force"...
... it beats the oddds and does
Wait, which article should I believe?
I so confuzzled...
If this random number generator can predict world events, and the new processors are expected to have a degree of unpredictability, I guess we'll have prescient computers. Microsoft could change their slogan to "We knew that's where you wanted to go today."
What does this button do...
As a great admirer of Albert Einstein and his scientific and social works, I believe you should find a more appropriate icon for stories which are almost certainly pseudoscience masquerading as science.
I nominate a picture of a spoon, neatly bent at a 90 degree angle, for these stories.
I mean, after reading the link, I really want to know (inquiring minds want to know).
I found a site with some hot stock tips. These are actually generated by radioactive decay- the server is interfaced to a Geiger counter. (A little applet is audibly clicking away in another browser window right now.) Those are the best random numbers in the universe because they are truly random and can be used to construct a portfolio that typically outperforms funds constructed from random numbers generated by the linear congruential method. Pseudorandom numbers are for the rubes like you and me. The insiders have the benefit of processes involving quantum mechanical randomness to guide their investment decisions.
GOOG will crash on Monday! You heard it here first.
Mod parent up. Parent's parent is completely uniformed. "He's his own grandpa", unfortunately.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Guess that Futurama guy from the cryogenics lab who says "Welcome... to the woooorrrlld of tomorroooowwww" will be getting the pink slip now.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
Ok, they DO have a legitimate page at princeton, but it doesn't say what the article claims it does.
I wonder if we link all these "eggs" up, if we would be able to detect the return of the Niburu (the inhabitants of Planet X) before they can invade? ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
People react before they are showed the image and he draws form that they are seeing the future!?! So maybe stage fright is someone seeing the future that they will suck on stage! The simplest explaination is often the true one. If things don't sync-up in your experiment try tweaking it before jumping to the conlcusion that time is to blame.
Extraodinary claims require extraodinary evidence.
I stumbled across this project years ago as I was researching "real" random number generation for encryption work. I found a very peculiar disclaimer from some manufacturers that claimed that the output would not be random is used in Psi research.
From that I found multiple pointers to a book, Margins of Reality, by Jahn and Dunne. It details research done at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab. They basically run millions of RNG trials with people trying to influence the result, and they get pretty much statistically provable effects, but at a very low level (something like a 5 parts per 10,000 deviation from the norm.) What's freaky is it's so consistent they've gotten to the point that they can tell you which test subject is influencing things by the results. Very freaky stuff.
Anyway, even if you're a die-hard prove-it-to-me science buff, the research results described in the book will really make you ponder how well we understand things, particularly RNGs and rigorous test procedures, if nothing else.
Compared to the idiot in the White House that stole the election, it would be an improvement. The asshole has killed 100,000 in Iraq, and all that has done is inflamed his desire to kill more non-whites. We haven't seen his like since Hitler walked the Earth. That's ironic, because it was his family that helped to put Hitler in power.
For more information on the true horrors of Bush, go to http://www.democraticunderground.com/ . They cover the real stories, not the crap that the 100% Bush-controlled media convers.
Things are going to get better with Dean leading the fight against the murderous regime, but the outcome isn't decided yet. We need to work hard to put an end to this horror.
Red Nova usually has good articles, but every once in awhile, one shows up that belies evidence of lack of scientific rigour. This is the case here.
An example (from the article:)
It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.
This sentence is prejudicial because it biases the results as being "stunning", without describing who finds the results stunning.
"Never satisfactorily explained" also presumes that someone finds it worthy of needing explanation.
Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'.
"Proved"? Pretty strong words with no supporting detail. Once I read sentences like this, I discount an article as being scientifically unfounded.
In response to the parent post:
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite.
I believe you're misinterpreting the laws of chance.
If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other.
Significant as a percentage? Unlikely.
Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
This is a trivial statement. If n flips has m total disparities, n+x flips will have between m and m+x disparities. It is therefore impossible for the total number of disparities to decrease, and almost guaranteed that it will increase.
The only significant measure of disparity is that of percentile disparity. And if you measure percentile disparity on a scale equivalent to the number of events being measured, it will in fact appear to be a nearly flat line on the graph.
The thing that bothers me about this "experiment" is that it presumes to assert that people can control a machine that generates random events, without describing the algorithm by which those random events are produced. Trying to simulate true randomness (indeed, what is random?) is a huge topic within math, statistics, and computer science; yet, it's not mentioned once within the article.
You say:
during times when many people are focused on the same thing, this random data is suddenly "less random".
Certainly, people in the U.S. join together and focus on the same thing every night during the news. They are less focused during regular working hours when everyone is concentrating on their own thing. So, is there a correlation between time-of-day and randomness for the machines closest to the U.S.?
Is there a correlation between machines? If the scientists put two machines in the same room, do they produce similar results?
I like all the qualifying terms you include in that statement! It's in the spirit of science. Science has no canon law. All claims require adequate support for provisional acceptance. Very different from religion where exceptional claims require exceptional proof, and even then might be rejected.
Loose lips lose spit.
1)A superstition is proved to be such
2) The universe/reality is explained a little better
So what is wrong with either outcome?
Just remember, it wasn't too long ago that the world was flat and near instant communication was impossible. Someone has to challenge what is blindly accepted as (un)true
It's like a religious crusade. It's worse that flame wars over Little endian vs Big endian.
As opposed to saying - lets see what the science says
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
We've already had an administration governed by astrology.
See parent for why. He makes interesting point about great-grandparent (his Parent's parent) that I was about to make.
-
What the hell, it's being run by Princeton? No way I'm believing this now.
I looked into it, and saw April 1st.
Table-ized A.I.
We can use future-peering-random-numbers to solve the problem with those unpredictable CPUs.
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
Classic case of weak correlation.
Worse, the correlation suggests the causation post-facto. Nobody even guesses there will be a correlation until there's an effect. And if there's no effect, nobody discounts the box's output.
Sad. Innumerate. Stupid.
When the local supermarket only has pizza (0) and health food (1) on the shelves, I just use the powers of my mind to influence wich one it will be, and it always comes up pizza.
I think the Eggs are causing it. For the sake of humanity, switch them all off NOW!
As a research physicist who deals with the theoretical implications of time reversal on a daily basis, it is my opinion this article is rubbish.
You can reverse time in a computer model or your can reverse time in mathematical equations, but there is no way that a RNG can respond to events of the future.
The article was much too light on details. A cursory reading makes me doubt how they constructed their RNG (true random numbers are extremely difficult to generate) and how they processed their data.
In short, the whole article and the research these people are doing sounds like a tremendous waste of time.
Is it just an algorithm or a quantom coin flipper?
I think we need a new definition of "top scientists." The one we are using now is obviously broken.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The only question is if they actually have the data to back it up (some graphs would be nice).
I would like detailed instructions on how to construct a stream of random numbers with behaviors that correlate to outside events as they describe, so that I can repeat their experiments myself and see if I can reproduce the same effect. Tabletop reproduction isn't always possible in science (e.g. historical sciences like archaeology, paleontology, cosmology- remember that, you creationists) but in this case reproduction of results should be easy. (If this were real.)
At the very least I want to know how to generate a stream of random numbers that reproduces this effect, how to recognize a prediction when it arrives in the stream, and how to assign a P-value for associations between random stream events and real world events. Unless we move past the sort of ex post facto "predictions" of past events, there is nothing new here. It looks like a repetition of work already done by Nostradamus.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Matrix crack jokes
Table-ized A.I.
unless you have money to gamble
You got that right. Options trading is gambling, pure and simple, like a slot machine. Mostly random, slightly skewed toward the "house" (Wall Street traders who see company news a few seconds before you do and act on it).
Oh sure, there are some cool formulas and stuff .. but the inputs to those formulas are equally random.
If you think of trading (derivatives or otherwise) as anything but entertainment like going to a movie or Vegas, you are delusional. ("you" meaning anyone reading your post and considering option trading).
And no, I haven't lost all my money trading options. I have option trading on my brokerage accounts, and I've used it a couple times, but going back I realized I could've made similar money without options, and without the complex commissions and tax consequences and nerve-wracking moments of starting at the ticker.
Heh. Articles: "Unpredictability in Future Microprocessors" [3 hours later] -> "Random Number Generator That Sees Into the Future"
Because this story is about on par with what I'd expect to see on the cover of that rag when I'm waiting in line at the supermarket.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You're playing with fragile young minds here.
From Prof Nelson's page at Princeton: " * Weather Springtime outdoor celebrations of Alumni Reunions and Commencement at Princeton University provide a "natural experiment" to see whether the common interest in good weather might produce a positive effect." _Now_ we know why the earth is warming! Everyone prefers warmer weather! Stop it, you fools, stop it!
The ability of an outside observer to affect the randomness of the outcome of a series of "coin flips" by simply willing one state or the other, is a well documented, repeated, scientifically established phenomenon. (as mentioned in the article)
It is not rational though. Which is why there are so many "it's all bullshit" comments on this thread.
Rationality and scientific orthodoxy are just as detrimental to the understanding of the world, as is religious fundamentalism.
After all, how can the speed of light be the same regardless of the speed of the observer? That's not rational.
Schrodenger's Cat was a theoretical experiment trying to prove that quantum mechanics was wrong. How can a cat be both alive and dead at the same time? Not rational.
I find it personally exciting when someone discovers everything I've ever been taught is wrong. But can see how it would be threatening to some people.
The universe may indeed be governed by laws that eventually we will be able to understand. Right now though, our knowledge of the universe is so incredibly small and limited, the idea that we can say "this is so, this isn't so." at this point is incredibly naive.
The universe still has many surprises in store for us to find, and only open-minded scientific inquiries like this will allow is to discover them.
Just write a random number generator with your favorite tool, and try to influence it with your mind.
Anybody has an idea how to measure significance?
It took me all of 5 seconds to find this article which pretty much debunks the entire project:m
http://www.skepticreport.com/print/radin2002-p.ht
War Games (Computer [digital voice]: "Would. You. Like. To. Play. A. Game?" Matthew Broderick: "How about Global Thermal Nuclear War?"); and there was U2's World War III album, War, including tracks like "Seconds" ("Push the button and pull the plug / Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh...");
irc.enterthegame.com #linux
How do the random number generators work?
If I were this guy, I would claim that women's breasts get firmer right before big events, and ask for a million-dollar grant to study hundreds of women. If you are going to be a quack, then go allll the way.
Table-ized A.I.
And they are not doing good science unless they do the two independent observations method, get thier false negatives and positivies, refine the criteria, and rinse, repeat.
GCP@home!
Or egging@home, maybe?
Imagine... A distributed network of geeks donating spare CPU cycles to produce... Randomly Generated Numbers!
Who would have thought of it?
How can an institution like Princeton be involved in this kind of garbage? Probably because great universities have a history of adopting popular, though ridiculous, positions.
I dusted off some material on the old and politically incorrect doctrine of eugenics the other day, speaking of ridiculous but popular ideas. A hundred years ago, people thought that we were facing a genetic twilight because of medical and social interventions that allowed the weak and deformed to propagate. Half-bake for a couple of decades at 451 degrees fahrenheit. Voila! Hitler.
This egg thing, however, is so far beyond the pale it would make the eugenicists blush. It is so ridiculous that eugenics seems positively well-grounded by comparison. Thus another wholesale crapfest lends credence to an earlier one, both by comparison, and by providing direct confirmation that, for whatever reason, the human brain IS actually turning to mush.
While the investigation of paranormal phenomena is within the realm of respectable science, crowing in the popular press about absurd extrapolations from the results of such science is certainly not.
I don't need an egg to predict this: we're doomed, doomed, doomed if we can't get this epidemic of dumbed-down touchy-feely pseudoscience bullshit under control.
sqrt(192*0.05*0.95) = 3.02
So we're 5.4 events away from expectations with a standard deviation of 3.02 events. This translates (through the student t-distribution) to a probability of about 0.08. That's intriguing, although not a mind blowingly low probability.
Aside from the statistics, they've got a problem with the scientific method. They don't have any control days, so if their machines just produced unlikely streams of numbers more often than they should, the researchers could accidentally assume they are predicting the future. A better test would be to run the REGs for a year, collect the stream of data, and keep it secret. Then, at the end of the year, the scientists could pick out an equal number of "important" and "unimportant" days. If there's a statistically significant difference in the frequency of unlikely REG data on important and unimportant days, then you've got something. If not, they might just have a problem with their REGs.
(I'd link to a better explanation of how I calculated standard deviation here, but the page I fould was an ugly pdf. You may have better luck simply Googling for it.)
Source: Daily Mail; London (UK)
Enough said...
"The thing that bothers me about this "experiment" is that it presumes to assert that people can control a machine that generates random events, without describing the algorithm by which those random events are produced..."
I believe their algorithm for producing random numbers was sound - it was based on completely unpredictable world events of extreme importance. Oh, wait...
http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/04/2341226.shtm l... these are the same people who were awarded a patent for a mental clapper in a previous slashdot article. The private company these guys formed, Mindsong, Inc., appears to have folded since 1998. This article also appears to be relevant. Apparently they're dealing with really really small numbers in what would seem to be dishonest ways, like rounding 50.01% up to 51% when discussing their results.
I am the 100th Monkee!
"During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.
It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.
Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'."
They missed the bit about the button in his pocket.
Wow. Got to keep that funding coming in.
First, they claim that the box can be made less random by people concentrating on it. They don't have a theory as to this can happen, but let's ignore that.
Then, they claim the box can predict the future when bad things happen, because of big "spikes" in the random stream.
Ignoring that this has to rewrite physics just a wee-bit, why the hell wouldn't the box "predict" somebody concentrating on it and change results beforehand? Or whatever.
Also, there's no theory here. Just some data analysis it seems.
And call me crazy, but given Occam's razor and all, why it is not more likely that the means of analysing data after an "experiment" is biased. Also, if these things can't be shielded, how can you do controls?
Seesh. Maybe I should box these up and sell 'em. "Predict your future!" Flag a note when "weird" things happen in the box and let the Hawthorne effect do the rest.
I didn't know Art Bell was now a Slashdot editor. I should have, though, because I did sense that a big change was coming to Slashdot a few hours ago, but I just didn't realize how it would be manifest... ;)
"Certainly, people in the U.S. join together and focus on the same thing every night during the news. They are less focused during regular working hours when everyone is concentrating on their own thing. So, is there a correlation between time-of-day and randomness for the machines closest to the U.S.?"
I think there needs to be a high degree of emotionalism, not just commonism.
"Is there a correlation between machines? If the scientists put two machines in the same room, do they produce similar results? "
Better, better, although with 64 "eggs" producing the same. Physical geography shouldn't play a part.
It may be unintuitive, but you are wrong. Try it, its no more than a line of perl :-) The expectation value of the number of heads is 50% (as it must be - it is symmetric), but the expectation value for the deviation from 50% diverges.
I must say, I am constantly impressed by how smart the folks around here are... I mean, smarter than a team of scientists from Princeton! WOW!
I must wonder... not that I trust a Wikipedia entry (I find that Wikipedia is often not even worth the paper that it is printed on...), but did you even READ the article you linked? If so, you obviously did not UNDERSTAND it.
The Wikipedia article states that the absolute number of deviant results will increase, which you apparently take to mean "there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other." That's not the case at all.
What is actually stated is that if you take 100 random samples, your absolute deviant results might be 5. If you take 1000 samples, your absolute deviant results might be 45. So, you had 40 more deviant results for 1000 samples than for 100. Again, I gotta say... DUH. The VARIATION is lower but you WILL have SOME variation... (less than 1% in a sample-group of >100 on average). 1% of 100 is 1. 1% of 1,000 is 10. 1% of a million is 10,000. So, as your sample group increases, so does how many results fit into that deviation.
However many random numbers you generate, deviation would STILL be a NEARLY flat line on the graph... well, unless you generate a very small quantiy of random numbers, of coz.
FWIW, I decided to test this myself. First, I generated a thousand RNs. Then, I generated a million RNs. Finally, I generated a billion RNs. The amount of devition from normal was practically nil. The raw deviation of course increased, but not in an alarming rate that would give me a "high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other."
So, whatever. Mr. Cat needs to read his own references better, I think.
What if their probability theory is wrong?
Philosophistry
But, as the text below shows, they appear to admit they could be wrong which is something that most /. posters will not do.
"Is something happening? If we can refrain from equating "anomalies" with "psi", it does seem that something is going on. Whether it is flawed research or a real phenomenon is still out. But when we take into account that Radin and GCP are not all that eager to falsify their own theories (as well as quoting Sagan and Hyman out of context to support their own agenda when in fact neither do!), it is very hard for me to accept that a real phenomenon is happening.
But, hey, I could be wrong! "
Princeton has had an "alternative" sciences department for decades: PEAR, most often cited for their research into remote viewing. They consistantly veer on the side of quackery, preferring to dismiss any elements of their "science" that categorically refute their findings in favour of a more popular conclusion, albeit confused and absurd.
I wonder if they could of predicted a slashdot effect, and could of got more bandwidth.. I can't seem to download the raw data, I guess it must be true.
mnewberg.com
Using my random number generator, I predict that this story will be duplicated on slashdot.org in the next week or so.
that's the sound of your tenure contract being ripped up you stupid fuck....
"oh it outputted 255 255 then 254! that means [7 years after the fact] that the world trade bombing was going to occur"
How is this any different that the backtracking predictions [which are also mixed with generalities] of nostradamus?
"There will be a meanie wearing a beanie who is going todo something or other..."
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Sept 11, 2002.
r y?id=97845&page=1
Winning lottery numbers were 9-1-1
An event like that has really only convinced me in some hippy sort of way, that our perception of reality is really a two way street, and we can effect it as much as it effects us, if we could focus hard enough.
Now according to this link:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/sto
It was a one in 500 chance.
Still is only taking into account the chance of those numbers being drawn, not compounding it with the number of drawings and it happening on that day.
For the ARGer's out there:
> creepy
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Perhaps the article should be read before people spend a whole 5 minutes trying to prove it to be a fraud
Or read their own blurb: "...we have created a world-spanning network of detectors sensitive to coherence and resonance in the mental domain. Continuous streams of data are sent over the internet to be archived and correlated with events that may evoke a world-wide consciousness...".
So they started with the assumption that their machines are "...detectors sensitive to coherence and resonance in the mental domain." This is just voodoo 'science'. Anybody can come to a sympathetic conclusion if the premise is based on that conclusion.
(Their funding seems dubious too.)
Did he inhale?
Okay, they have a bunch of random number generators all over the world. At certain times, these generators, which should be totally independent of each other, appear to start generating "less random" data simultaneously.
Okay, that's kind of interesting. If everything is set up properly, that sort of thing shouldn't happen.
And obviously, the reason it's happening is because these random number generators are being influenced by subconscious human thought, and they're predicting the future. No other explanation is possible. Or rather, any other possible explanation is even *less* likely.
Poor Occam...
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
I bet there was a spike of 1's right before this post appeared on Slashdot. It was predicting the massive slashdotting of the page.
what does this prove, other than that they just didn't build a very good random number generator?
once you go slack, you never go back
As I recall the random number is generated via the radioactive decay of unstable nuclei, a phenomenon assumed to be utterly chaotic.
Here's a Wikilink.
Also informative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactivity
---
All your old jokes are belong to sigs.
Academics at princeton must be wincing by now.
It should have been obvious to anyone that the spike on Sept. 6th was due to the fact that 17,471 individuals were simultaneously eating peanut butter sandwiches causing a double shift to the right in the randome sequence. The failure of the Princeton gang to take this into account led to a miscalibration.
Sorry, no story here. Er wait, it seems that Nostradamus is trying to find his way out of the box!
Ya know, all the posters saying 'you didn't read the whole article', and 'it's hosted at Princton' should get a clue. Don't belive everything you read on the internet.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Except they shouldn't be straight lines at all. They should take random directions all the time. Sometimes even very big ones. A flat line is one of the least random things produced in the world. If GC existed according to how REGs worked, atomic clocks would randomly lose percision around major events.
I mean a scientist is quoted as saying "Our data shows clearly that the chances of getting these results by fluke are one million to one against." I would actually place the chance much much lower, I mean a million to one is nothing really. The odds of 30 coin flips in any order is a million to one. The real problem is prediction. The question is whether the model can predict into the future what events will cause blips and the magnitude of the event.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
A million monkeys at a million typewriters have eventually replicated the work of Shakespeare.
"Random Number Generator That Sees Into the Future"
...yes it tells you what numbers will be randomly generated tomorrow!
they're all already well aware of Princeton's PEAR project, of which this guy is a key member, and know all about their special brand of science.
the kind of science that's stupid.
If the simulation periodically tests to see if random events should occur, then it could explain how groups of seemingly unrelated people have the same idea or do the same things at the same time. For example, two people get into their cars; one drives five miles, one drives twenty; both walk into the same store at the same time and ask for the same extremely obscure item.
OK, assuming that's the case, then what do you think is more likely -- that the simulation bothers to calculate out widely separated start points for these two events, such that their end points coincide? That would be a very complex calculation, considering all the interactions that might occur with other events. A much simpler explanation would be that our perception of time is running backwards, that the end points of the events are actually their beginnings... and that their geographic and chronological proximity is just a bug!
This is more evidence "The Matrix" exsisting.
If you read up on the Jung's theory of the Collective Unconscious It provides a reasonable explanition for our minds 'being networked'.
However, how would a machine be able to tap into this network?
Our overlords have made a glitch.
Working for an infinite period, they'd eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, yeah?
You'd probably get the entire contents of Usenet too for free.
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
At the very least I want to know how to generate a stream of random numbers that reproduces this effect
Any stream of random numbers will work. If a *special* stream is required, then it's not random...
"Hey doc, theres a spike in the graph. What shall we do this time? Avalanche? Nuclear meltdown?" "Let's go for tsunami."
When the tsunami happened, I didn't see anything special in the data... do they cook the books?
Or maybe go see 'What The Bleep Do We Know?", the most mainstream alternitive movie ever, and get an idea of what people think passes for reason these days.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Like most others I'm highly sceptical of any claims of the paranormal. However, what strikes me as odd is your use of the word "pseudoscience" - as if with authority. Are you suggesting that the paranormal is not amenable to controlled studies? Are you suggesting that all involved in this project lack the requisite research and technical skills? I'm curious how would you know how to assess any research study including the statistical analyses.
My bet is that an hour ago this thing started spewing zeros like crazy...
I'd like to see this experiment reproduced with something which expresses quantum randomness, like Brownian Motion. If the noosphere impacts matter on the quantum level, then the potential impact is staggering.
This thing wasn't engineered by Ben Affleck was it? ;)
Sorry, but this reeks of a P.K. Dick type prediction/tale... pretty cool and dangerous if it's true...
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
It may not be a "special" stream, but a specific way of implementing a generator that looks to be totally random. I'd like to see several years' worth of data, so that I can compare it with historical events beyond the scope that they've so far mentioned.
The point of science is to attempt to understand the universe that we inhabit. If there's some correlation between otherwise random events and specific events that can be reliably demonstrated then we'll have some piece of the universe newly discovered, and we can begin to explore it and its full implications. That doesn't mean that it's likely, or that even if it's true that everyone would immediately accept it, but it's still progress as long as the proper methods are used.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It is man that draws conculsions from random event. So, "Did randomness create man or did man create randomness."
Eh...not a very good debunking, IMHO.
The response to images makes sense - people would learn a response. If they really want to show the something significant, they'd have to show that people can either anticipate a correct strong response all of the time (by also showing images that would invoke no response), or show that they would invoke a strong response the first time after a series of no-responses.
The other part doesn't jive, though. The theory that this group of devices predicts disasters does not preclude the idea that it also produces false positives - or even that it also picks up something else of significance that has not been identified.
Still, I question how they go about producing these random numbers. That could be the culprit.
Oh, and as far as the straight line thing, and the curve - they're obviously talking about aggregated data. Unlike the "law of averages" as applied to a single number, the probability of getting a large number of the same values over and over can be calculated. It is very important to remember that what has happened in the past should have some weight in predicting what will happen in the future.
What if all scientists took your approach to science?
"Oh look, the apple fell from the tree, and I think it fell at the same accelaration as the last object I saw fall. I wonder if all objects fall with the same acceleration? Too bad I can't learn anything from that, since what happens in the past has no bearing at all on the future. I'm gonna go get some pie."
It is quite easy for someone versed in probability to calculate (and I'm hoping they have) the likelihood of occurance of the anomalies they have witnessed. And if they've gotten a significant result (as in - this possibility that has occured 4 times this month should only happen on average once every hundred years...), then it might be worth looking into. Of course, maybe they're just fooling themselves, or being fooled by someone else. That's an awful lot of highly educated people to not realize that an anomoly is actually normal.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
For a moment i thought we had a dupe right next to the original article.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Yeah like slashdotting the "eggs".
OK, 65 eggs, so we'll use the extra one as a parity bit. Everyone concentrate on the following binary number really really hard:
1010011 1101100 1100001 1110011 1101000 1000100 1101111 1110100 1
Someone had to do it.
It took me all of 5 seconds to find this article which pretty much debunks the entire project:
The article you link to debunks nothing.
Basically, the argument of the article is this:
(1) He showed me that, coincidentally with such-and-such an event, the RNGs strayed significantly from 50/50.
(2) I showed him that they also did the day before.
(3) I asked him what happened the day before.
(4) He said he didn't know.
(5) Ergo, what a load.
While that argument is seemingly cogent from a simplistic point of view, a little thought reveals that it's basically irrelevant. Specifically, the argument merely debunks a claim that is not being made in the first place.
These spikes happen all the time. No one denies that. Pointing out that - which is all the supposed "debunking" article does - is neither here nor there.
The claim being made is that the spikes happen more frequently than predicted by random chance when "major" events happen. This supposed "debunking" article does not address that claim at all. At all.
I am interested in how they generate their "random" numbers. If it turns out to be a non-linear function/system with a route to chaos, then the data may simply be the function exploring its phase space. When it becomes chaotic, it locks into one region of phase space for a while. Random, but deterministic.
Looking at their site now to see what they say about their RNG...
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
Validation:
Associate any set of ideas with Einstein, preferable through geographical location quips, within 5 steps or less and your hypothesis is 'proven' in the court of psi-chic luv.
Encasing a bodypart of einstein's in a healing rose quartz crystal and rubbing it against one's second chakra is also advised.
Its a scientific fact!!!!111
Omigod..... I'm PSYCHIC!!!!
I think I'll just go to sleep now ... before I get more tired.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
It's "Pi", Directed by Darren Aronofsky, 1998
"A paranoid mathematician searches for a key number that will unlock the universal patterns found in nature."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/
True randomness will give you apparently non-random data, the same as enough monkeys typing at random on enough keyboards for enough years will give you Shakespeare.
--
Ah ha. Look at the source at the bottom.
...' at the begining of the piece to make it more credible.
Source: Daily Mail; London (UK)
It may be that Red Nova is a valid news site, but they should really check the status of their sources. The Mail will run just about any sensational piece of b*ll*cks doing the rounds. They are not the sort of organ that would want to cloud the reader's faith in the paranormal with any of that cynical questioning. Please insert the phrase 'Top scientists believe
Click here and search for "Crop Circles", "MI6" or "UFO".
Nice link... kinda blows the whole thing out of the water.
I'd mod you up but I don't have points. Hopefully a moderater will notice your post
Apparently there was more to the message...
1 10010100100000011000010010000001100010011001010110 11110111011101110101011011000110011000100000011000 11011011000111010101110011011101000110010101110010 00100000011011110110011000100000011100100110000101 10111001100100011011110110110100100000011011100111 01010110110101100010011001010111001000100000011001 11011001010110111001100101011100100110000101110100 01101111011100100111001100100001
0100100101101101011000010110011101101001011011100
The word is ridiculous. I wouldn't say anything, but your particular spelling is getting to be epidemic here on /. (I see it several times a day). And since assholes routinely mod me down for even mentioning spelling errors, well, I'll be posting this as AC, thank you very much.
Some people seem to take pride in their bad spelling. Do those same people also take pride in writing buggy code with syntax errors all over the place? English is the code that we use to communicate, and when the syntax is fucked, you get the real-life equivalent of a core dump--i.e., other people can't compile your output.
Believe it... *dramatic inhale* ...or not.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
You can't quantify "emotional impact" or "historical significance" so if it's predicting anything then what might it be predicting?
If electrical activity either from brains or from communication systems has some kind of "uncertainty effect" that extends back and forth through time, then maybe they could correlate this with studies of how people rated their degree of concern about something, or how much extra network bandwidth was consumed during the events.
Or perhaps they could observe local effects. For example, some country in Africa crowns a new king. Almost nobody in the USA even knows about it, but maybe the meters in that country would react. If the country has little or no electronic infrastructure, then it would only be brainwaves doing it.
Silly? No sillier than horseless carriages 200 years ago.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
***Poster flames topic at hand.. "Stupid pile of horseshit never gonna happen"
Ok, going from a very scientific standpoint, there's abnormalities occuring at random number generators at roughly the same time.
What is causing them?
1. Bad hardware?
No, cause they use a multitude of RNG equipment with different ways to make the RNG's.
2. Electric surges?
No, the "eggs" or RNG devices are in different parts of the world.
3. Radiation?
Thats a source of randomness, yet we see un-randomness.
4. Earthquakes?
Possible. Do spikes coorelate with known seismic activity?
5. Neutrino emissions?
The detecters with superpure water should eliminate/validate this.
6. Deviations of Schumann resonance?
Perhaps data from Berkley can clear that up...
Is there ANY global natural phenomena that could make this data consistently go.. 'weird'?
I remember first reading about this shortly after Sept 11th. It's certainly intriguing -- if not only for the fact that, as a humans, we seem to want to believe in mysterious things like this.
That first day I read about it, I couldn't help but be perplexed: Was Sept 11th REALLY a significant enough world event to register a response? I mean, really? While big news to us, only a few thousand people died. That's nothing compared to most global tragedies.
At the time, I figured I'd suspend my evaluation of it until a genuinely Big event happened. Well, by anyone's account, the tsunami was probably the biggest catastrophe that will happen in any of our lifetimes. Over 200,000 people dead. If there's any true ability in this theory, the December readings should have been literally OFF THE CHARTS.
However, I can't find/don't know enough to evaluate the data. And I felt the article skirted around how significant the December findings were. Anyone out there able to compare the December readings to both A) Normal results and B) Sept. 11th?
- Fatty
... the midichlorian counts of those persons using the device?
and from whose perspective?
Shouldn't the accuracy be measured by making a chart of every day since the eggs have been monitored and filling every "major" world event into it. Then see if the up or downswing in the numbers gets larger with "more important" events.
And should also search for spikes tha had no reasonably important event to associate them with.
Don't worry. The third zero was actually simultaneous with a fart that occurred near the device. Taking this effect into account its obvious that we are all going to live forever so actually there is absolutely no need for us to peer into the future. We will see it unfold in due time. Take my word for it.
If you don't believe me, I draw your attention to the juxtaposition of the fouth zero occuring between two ones. Now do you see it?
Actually, the black box puts out a psuedorandom bitshifted UNICODE that can be read backwards in Swahili interlaced every p-1/^4 lines with Urudu in ISO 9660 format to make it easier to follow world events.
I see that tomorrow, I'm scheduled to receive an honorary degree at Princeton Institute for Advanced Paranormal Studies of the Fourth Kind.
This quite possibly has a simple explanation if you make a couple of assumptions that have largely been proven:
The quantum states of subatomic particles are entwined with and affect the states of other particles. Essentially, entangled particles are the same particle existing in two or more places at once.
Space and time are relative and functions of each other. Therefore, if a quantum particle or more precisely a unique quantum state can coexist in multiple spatial locations, it most certainly can coexist in multiple temporal locations. The "information" of quantum state changes is transferred between entangled particles instantly and over infinite distances without the use of any matter or energy. Therefore, the domains and constraints of space and time do not apply to quantum information.
Ok, here comes the big assumption: If we assume consciousness is in part a function of quantum states, then consciousness can directly affect the universe without transfer of matter or energy and is not constrained by "real" space or time.
The fact that ordinary random number generators are detecting an anomaly vs. some kind of specialized instrument just contributes more evidence to this theory. "True" random number generators typically work by amplifying and digitizing the static produced in an intentionally noisy circuit. Random electromagnetic energy is essentially the product of random quantum states. If something is influencing those states it will produce a pattern in the randomness.
of my own real quick... infinite loop, includes showing maximum deviance from 1 and 0 being the same on the plus side (more 1's) and the neg side (more 0's). Enjoy!
All your searching needs (and free money!) - 4Lancer.net
Hmm, only the wonders are described by this device, however, no one bothered to explain HOW it can detect the future, how it works, how it was built, etc. They also said nostrodamus predicted 9/11. Also said the same passages predicted the bay of pigs incident, preal harbor and other such events. Personaly, i want to see it replicated, detailed specs produced on the web so we can make our own 'physic box' to play with. This is Psuedo science, pure and simple.
Dude, your collection of video games is WAY more interesting than this pitiful article. In fact, that might be the most interesting thing I have seen in several weeks,
It's "PI", Directed by Darren Aronofsky, 1998
"A paranoid mathematician searches for a key number that will unlock the universal patterns found in nature."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/
Any stream of random numbers will work. If a *special* stream is required, then it's not random...
No, this is incorrect. There exists an infinite variety of streams of random numbers, and not all of them have the same properties, nor are they of the same quality, nor would all random number sources normally be expected to react to outside events (like someone coming to the lab and "concentrating") in the same way. Random numbers can be gotten from a radioactive source (which might be one of thousands of different isotopes), rolling dice, unstable electronic circuits, dripping faucets, the weather, etc. All can map cleanly to a given range and can usually pass all tests used to determine whether or not a sequence is truly random. The pseudorandom numbers that are commonly used in computing (for example) are generated by linear congruential methods and they fail these tests; k-tuples of these numbers form a lattice structure when you plot them in k-dimensional space. If any stream of truly random numbers will work, then any of these sources can be used to predict the future!
Now granted, this is all solidly in the realm of nonsense, so this discussion is already a bit esoteric. But if you seriously think that these guys are right and that outside events are reflected in their random number streams, then the question arises, is there a connection between these human-world events and the random number generator they're using, or is the connection between those events and the random numbers themselves- just by virtue of their randomness?
I say it's between outside events and the particular generator being used, because that (although wildly implausible) is the weaker of these two claims- which are both whoppers. If the prediction comes from the numbers themselves, then the claim being made here is a much, much stronger claim- that any random process is somehow connected to major events in the human world. Now that's the sort of magic I stopped believing in by the time I was 4. (I don't buy the weaker claim either, but I have to acknowledge that it has an infinitely greater chance of being true than the stronger claim.)
I modded him +1 Funny, ruining his informative rating.
But then I replied to this, making my mod not count. Bet you didn't see that coming, oh predictor of the future, did you?
paintball
Maybe that's why the java applet dies after only a little bit...
All your searching needs (and free money!) - 4Lancer.net
"Could the concentrated emotional outpouring of millions of people be able to influence the output of his REGs."
This is not a new phenomenon. In Ghostbusters, emotional outpouring made the statue of liberty move, and in Elf it made Santa's sleigh fly. Flipping a couple of bits seems trivial in comparison.
"I am part of a religion that believes the Earth is alive and will receive a paradisical glory because it has "obeyed" all the laws that would qualify it for such a reward/rest from the evilness it was had to bear."
."
:p
translates to: "I am part of the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Fanclub
Joking aside though, I don't have anything in general against the philosophical backing of (as you explain it) your religion, besides the specific criticisms that:
1. As man should be culpable for his travasties against 'gaia', the earth should be responsible for the sins it has done unto humankind. Just because it is 'aware', doesn't mean the earth is sin-free. Perhaps the earth was born into original sin
2. I hope paradisical glory is available within expanded shell of our sun's death throes.
I actually kindof like a form of pantheism, but I suspect my anti-theist moodswings exist because if a singular 'God' exists, that God has more serious shit to atone for than any of us.
I'll wait for the inevitable analysis, and most likely, debunking of this to pass final judgement, but this has the smell of a deliberate hoax, possibly perpetrated as part of a psychological study or by some sort of sketpical group to study the persistence of popular myths.
Two things that give it a bad smell: the mention of Diana (psychics love bringing up predictions about Diana; if James Randi were to stage this, he'd throw that in as a joke,) and the post hoc ergo prompter hoc nature of the 'predictions.' Note that the prediction concerning Diana was about her funeral, not her death, though the immediate reaction to her death would have been much stronger than the reaction to the funeral. All researchers into the paranormal claim to be able to control for this sort of second guessing. If this projects interpretations stand up to scrutiny, it will be the first time for a project of this nature.
The other oddity is that probability does not say that the ones and zeroes will even out over a period of time, but that they will tend to even out over time. There will, however, be periods where this averaging will not occur, with no other explanation necessary beyond pure random chance. Given enough time, even the most improbable thing will happen. Low probability is not zero probability. I suspect that if this is not a deliberate hoax, it is a mathematical error motivated by wishful thinking.
There are at least 1,000 cookey professors who managed to get tenure at universities running cookey experiments.
There is a very good chance that one out of every 100 of them oberves that their experiment makes a prediction that has only a 1% chance of being coincidence.
paintball
Speak for yourself. I have eleven realities. I work at Princeton (at various times in the future).
As for science, isn't it obvious that with the box we really don't need it any more?
Excuse me while I step back into the future, I have some shopping to do and I expect to be hungry three days from now.
Did the folks at Princeton tell you that by holding your hands outstretched as you moved between the present and the future you could cause ripples in time? Thats how I discovered 3 additional parallel universes, all frame shifts of the same binary sequence.
Is this black box called "Nostradamus"?
>Ok, they DO have a legitimate page at princeton, but it doesn't say what the article claims it does.
Really? And what does the paragraph below mean (http://noosphere.princeton.edu/)?
Before spreading FUD, get your fucking facts right.
---
The purpose of this project is to examine subtle correlations that appear to to reflect the role of consciousness in the world. The scientific work is at the margins of our understanding, and our view is enriched by a creative and poetic perspective. Here we present two separate ways to become acquainted with the project, and with some of its scientific and philosophical implications.
When queried about the future of the Microsoft Corporation, the miraculous prophetic computer, now named The Vision(tm) responded about sensing the "distinct scent of rot" along with "outlook not so good."
In a frenzied storm of predictions T.V. also predicted the death of BSD, of which Netcraft aparantly has recently confirmed, as well as 2007 being (finally) the year of the Linux desktop.
Researchers also noted that when they asked several times about the future of the US economy all the machine would respond with was the cryptic phrase: "When pieces of paper have values that are weighted in strength against other pieces of paper, what do you ultimately have?"
Feeling somewhat emboldened by their successes the team felt compelled to ask about some very questionable futures.
When asked about the possibility of a complete world wide nuclear war, T.V. responded that while the probability would seemingly be rather high, the real numbers are actually much lower.
However T.V. may have generated the currect future sequence of events, and if what it says becomes truth and eventually histroy, we are facing an immediate crisis of immense proportions.
Now please try to be calm, but if this technology is right, and it has been so far......... Saudi Arabia will launch a nuclear attack against the United States in 2012.
President Bush has made the following statement:
"This is a clear act of future war. We must act now and make a preemptive strike against this axis of evil. We will bring freedom and democracy and take out all who fear or despise what they know not of. If we do not act now the future of America is in peril. We must invade this country not for their oil, but, because they are not a free people."
TRANSMISSION FAILED!
zosxavius photography
"studies have shown it can flow backwards as well as forwards."
What studies? Ones that haven't occurred yet?
It is interesting that this article was published just this month but they don't make any reference to the Tsunami in SE Asia and whether the box predicted it. Anyone have insight about this? I thought it was bullshit until I saw Princeton.
I think the poster was reading a summary of the Star Trek episode in the TV section, not an article in the news section. Its the DS9 ep where Bashir's fellow genetically altered really smart people predict that the Federation is doomed.
So if I show you shocking images to someone, who either knows they will be shocking images or observes a pattern of shocking images, the images "register" a few seconds before the image is show? And this is supposed to be some sort of metaphysical clairvoyance?
It seems that's just anticipation and expectation, nothing more. The subject anticipates the shocking image before it's shown. Just like you anticipate "something" behind that closed door in the horror film when the "scary" music plays... you don't know what is there but you react none the less.
The percentage of deviation grows smaller as the set of generated numbers grow larger.
Try it, its no more than a line of perl :-)
Your perl code is suspect.
I'll believe it when they show us the graphs for today... as geeks around the world slasdot their servers.
You know, I had one of these "eggs" or "black boxes" if you prefer... it had a white circle on it with a black "8" in the middle and it was the shape of a ball.
If people are stupid enough to believe this, they are likely dumb enough to buy the stuff thats advertised on the Red Nova site.
What else really matters anyway?
At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.
I'm sure some random number generators use chaotic phenomenon, but not this box.
If it actually works, the live data should probably <g> have shown a deviation giving several hours' advance notice of posting the story on the Slashdot, considering the well-known catastrophic impact of a few million geeks hitting the same server (and furiously debating the theory)...
You can do such generator for yourself. Geiger counters ain't expensive, and for radioactive material try old Russian watches with phosphorising dials.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
The only question is if they actually have the data to back it up (some graphs would be nice).
Any idiot can make a graph. You put crap in and you get crap out. I would like to see duplicated results, source code, equipment, etc. Then, maybe some graphs. Not before.
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?
Here's what the Skeptic Report has to say about the "Global Consciousness Project".
I'd like to see how many "special" sequences they had which were NOT followed by an event they deemed special.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Believing in superstitious quackery like this black box has serious ramifications.
Closing your mind has more serious ramifications. The black box has thus far survived some serious, long-term scientific scrutiny. At what point does statistical significance override the fear that blinds you?
How would you like the USA to be guided by witches and warlocks?
I don't see that happening. But how would you like the USA to be guided by people with minds blind to the measurable statistical significance (albeit small) simply because "it shouldn't work like that"?
I read a bit more until I got to this:
/., of course....
"Could he have detected a totally new phenomena?""
Not the grammar I would expect to hear from a "reputable" news source. Oh, acceptable for
I haven't read enough about this (I just read the article), but if I didn't misunderstand, the machine throws a 0 or a 1 randomly. I'm concerned there are a lot of things we yet don't know, but finding a relation between such machine and -what we call- reality has no sense. I would accept someone saying there's a way to know the future, but whether that machine gives more 0's than 1's while some "global event" is happening could be just a coincidence.
i have some questions for these people.
how often does a spike of statistically significant magnitude occur? what magnitude do they require to deem it significant?
similarly, how many "false positives" have they had? how many major (and how do they define major?) events without a spike? how many significant spikes without an event?
was there a spike leading up to predictable events? the world series? the super bowl? the inauguration of king george?
conversely, was there a spike on a day in which nothing much at all happened?
finally, have they ever heard of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy? (although in this case i suppose it should be " pre hoc ergo propter hoc")
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
I'd like to see how many "special" sequences they had which were NOT followed by an event they deemed special.
Probably lots. Their numbers are apparently downloadable, but you can always derive ex post facto "predictions" from random crap.
They have a random number generator...which, if it's truly random, will eventually generate every possible finite sequence from [01]*, even those that have a lot more 0s than 1s or vice versa...and in a couple of instances, after the fact, they noticed that one of those skewed sequences occurred before some momentous event.
That's not predicting the future...that's cherry-picking data that fit one's preconceived notions.
Doesn't work., Monkeys will not reproduce Shakespeare, because monkeys are not true random number generators.
You will mostly just get the letter "s".
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
But you are no Jedi yet.
Any stream of random numbers will work. If a *special* stream is required, then it's not random...
Say they have a random sequence r_1, r_2, r_3... which has subsequences {s_1}, {s_2}, {s_3}, {s_4} (mapping to portions of the r sequence) that are determined to be predictive of human-world events H_1, H_2, H_3...
I can then construct a modified sequence (call it "t", i.e. t_1, t_2, t_3...) where all the sequences have been removed (or have been exchanged by chunks of the r sequence that are way further down). The t sequence is a perfectly random sequence, just like r, and it predicts none of the events in the H series. Therefore, even if a random sequence exists with these properties, other random sequences exist that will not work, and the statement any stream of random numbers will work is false. QED.
Funny it triggers after mayor news events in the west, i.e. death of princess Diana. Or reacts to what is reported on the 'western' media reports.
So apparently the rest of the world is not important enough for this thing to react to. Africa, North Caucasus, Nepal, Haiti... Have all had their share of human disasters but haven't been lucky enough for this generator to count them.
And the article itself mentions:
"Cynics will quite rightly point out that there is always some global event that could be used to 'explain' the times when the Egg machines behaved erratically. After all, our world is full of wars, disasters and terrorist outrages, as well as the occasional global celebration. Are the scientists simply trying too hard to detect patterns in their raw data?"
Tell me , are the yanks still burning witches?
1) Hardware random number generators - are the ones they're using truly random? Can the results be duplicated by others using other equipment/methods?
i.e. if they employed monkeys typing on typewriters, can the variation in randomness be duplicated?
2) are they indirectly measuring something else, albeit not a "global consciousness" but say, internet traffic? Or to rephrase.. maybe the internet is now semi-conscious?
If we used Gordon Rugg's verifier approach to this, perhaps Roger Nelson is beyond the scope of his speciality?
A friend of mine gave me an item he found in some sort of old chemistry set from the fifties (they made good stuff back then- now it's all baking soda and vinegar). It was a little metal tube, with a lens at one end, and a phosphorescent screen with uranium or radium at the other end.
You went into the dark with this thing, and after 30 minutes you could look through the lens and see the individual sparkles (i.e. the future). You could even take the lens off and see the soft glow of the future. I wish I hadn't lost it.
He did not say percentage.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Here go the magicians of Egypt, reproducing prophesying so nobody should believe in God... Nothing new under the sun. See Exodus 7-12 by Moses of MIT (Midian Institute of Theology)
True randomness will give you apparently non-random data, the same as enough monkeys typing at random on enough keyboards for enough years will give you Shakespeare.
True, but it is very much less likely that the apparantly non-random data appear than the ones that look random (and yes, that's a tautology). As for monkeys typing Shakespeare at random, "enough monkeys" is not the word for it. You would want approximately 26 to the power of the number of characters in Shakespeare of monkeys, where approximately means within a hundred orders of magnitude of that number. That number so tremenously huge that you can't imagine it. As a comparison, the number of atoms in the visible universe is 10^80. So you would want many many many order of magnitude more monkeys than there are atoms in the universe, or an amount of time that would make the time since the Big Bang inconsequential even to mathematicians. Even though you are technically right, I think you are abusing the meaning of "enough".
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
If we all think REAL HARD, it'll change the numbers? C'mon everyone, lets try it!!!
"Wait, another prediction... yes... this is sinister... it looks like there is heat, intense heat, fire... someone is getting flamed! The editors of Slashdot are getting flamed! Oh the humanity!"
It's like tossing spam. You look at the subject, and go "Oh, man, not this sh*t again", then you toss it in the junk folder to add to the filtering stats.
Of course, I once almost tossed an email from my mom with the subject "Fwd: You'll never believe this".
In any case, this looks like your average case of popsci about pseudoscience. If not, the law of the site is that somebody here at slashdot will do the more research that you're asking for (but apparently didn't do yourself), and go.... "Hmm... they really do have valid methods and good data, here, here and here." (with proper explanations of the methods and data) which I'll then follow. I'm not holding my breath, though.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Hmm, let's see:
* Bible code? -check-
* Nostradamus? -check-
* this thingy -check-
"When your model predicts something only after it has happened then you have instead made a 'postdiction.'" - Neil DeGrasse Tyson
USNG: 14TPU4605
Who cares if it seems reasonable! Let's be "skeptical!"
I wonder, could they have "detected ripples" due to the /. hive mind focusing their attention on the RNG's?
Of course about 10 minutes before the article was published.
No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
The article may very well be about pseudo-science. However trying to counter it with pseudo-reasoning and confusing distinct, well-defined statistical properties doesn't advance the cause of science. In fact it looks not only bad but desperate.
My professor in statisitics would probably have pitched an eraser at you for suggesting what amounts to an oxymoronic "high probability of the improbable." If the probability is 1:1,000,000, then in one million experiments there is a finite probability (1:1,000,000) that you may see the event once, and a lesser finite probability you would see it more than once. If something improbable turns up "significantly" as you phrase it then you check to see if the dice are honest.
In fact, the mean value of a normally distributed series of random numbers should trend toward a constant value. In the case of runs of 0s and 1s, it should trend toward 0.5 and approximate it more closely as the experiment runs.
The variance should tend to increase as less probable values fill the wings of the bell curve. The longer the series of random values the more nearly normal that trend should be and the greater the potential variance may be, since with a longer experiment you can actually acquire less probable runs that simply could not occur earlier. For instance you need to toss a coin a minimum of 20 times to have even the possibility of achieving 1:1,000,000 odds (1:1048576, actually 2^20). You would need to toss a good many more times than that before you could legitmately begin to worry of a 1:1,000,000 occurence did not show up.
That's how Los Vegas makes a living. The rubes always hope that the improbable will kiss them on the neck. In fact nothing you say actually contradicts the quote you are trying to criticize. They are discussing the mean results while you are talking about the variance.
The simplest explanation for their "correlation" is simply coincidence of highly improbable runs temporarily skewed the data. Remember that the experiment has been running for years so some really improbable runs are possible. They need a lot more disasters before they can actually test an argument based on a statistical improbability.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Confirmed: I can use a random number generator to predict the future. For example, suppose that I am pathetically incompetent at math, but want to predict the results of gambling at roulette. I can use the random number generator to provide simulated results, than use the results to show that I would win a few and lose a few + a little bit. Thus, I can predict the future using random numbers.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I can't beleive it but ...
What else do I need to beleive?
In a prank article of Asimov's, thiotimoline (which doesn't exist, BTW) dissolves a fraction of a second before contact with water. This discovery inspires a scientist to create a "thiotimoline battery," a chain of thiotimoline cells, each triggered before the other, and use it to predict the future. But a feedback loop through time creates a natural catastrophe as the device tries to destroy itself, forcing the scientist to disable it.
Perhaps the authors should try chemicals instead of a random number generator.
"A worthy cause has never been harmed by the truth" - Gandhi
In taking an (excellent) economics course in college, I was assigned the de rigeur "follow a handful of stocks and explain their motion" project. We did it for, I believe, 12 weeks. I faithfully followed some financial stocks day to day and produced weeekly summaries, diligently comparing movement in the stocks to events in the financial and wider worlds.
:)
At the end of the paper I wrote, I had a disturbing flash of honesty and commented that, while I had successfully drawn connections between every movment and some event, I had no faith in my explanations. The world is too big and the connections between any event and my stocks was so tenuous, that I suspected random chance. Moreover, because there were so many events in the world on any given day -- some positive and some negative -- that one could always find something that moved the data "the right way".
This project sounds awfully similar to me.
BTW, the prof noted my reservations and commented (paraphrased) "That's what you were intended to learn from this exercise all along."
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I had a very important interview a few days ago and the same day I got (for the first time) 5 Mod points.
The interview went REALLY well.
Is there a connection?
If you can't mod them join them.
What you do is take the computer and document it's predictions. Document what they are and when they'll happen. This could be done where it is now, Randi would never need to see it. The documents are then given to Randi and perhaps other parties. You then wait, and see how many, if any, come true. If the machine really is predicting the future, then there should be lots of correct predictions.
This wouldn't explain how it works, but Randi's never demanded that, just show that something does work.
However, I imagine that the predictions fall in to one of two categories:
1) Ones that are "clear" only ex post facto. Basically the machine generates a "prediction" but it can't be understood. Then an event happens and, oh my goodness, look, the machine predicted it! We just didn't know what it meant until the event happened, how convienet!
2) Really vague predictions that can be applied to many things. This is what you get with things like Nostradamus. People try and twist things around, project, speculate, etc to make it fit whatever event it is they've picked on.
At any rate, just because the research is happening at a big university, doesn't mean it's real or it's science. I personally just don't care to look in to it, but I'd caution everyone to be skeptical, as always. There's plenty of junk science that happens at big universities.
I call it a radar detector, most the time when it starts going crazy the police are nearby, and generally it predicts a major event in my life.
Does anyone else find it surreal that Pat Niemeyer (Slashdot ID #444913) posted the original note in this thread, then disagreed with his own post in another post, and got modded up for it both times??
~.^
You'd think the Slashdot crowd would be slightly more skeptical.
This whole thing reminds me of a study I vaguely remember reading about.
Take any event (lighting strikes?, etc) with a certain random distribution - Poisson distribution with a peak around 2.5 seconds - or something like that - and ask someone to control it with their minds. People end up believing that they're making it happen. Their mind is kind of tricked into believing in the bio-feedback of events with that distribution.
How do I know the events weren't being triggered by the folks? Because they were tape-recorded, and played back by the researchers. And yet, each person in the trial ended up with the impression that, yes! they really were impacting the device!
Can someone find a reference for this study? I'd love to be able to refer to it.
Education is the silver bullet.
Selection for positive cases is what creates and enforces religion.
If someone escapes narrowly from an accident, it must have been god's hand. Thank god for it. If the person dies, god isn't blamed (his/her time had come, or the person is even blamed for being a bad person).
I read a story about muslims reinforcing their religion by the fact that many mosks had survived the tsunami (neglecting that houses of religion are usually better built than the huts around them; the fact that hindu temples survived nicely also was also neglected. My god is better than yours!).
Bert
Listen, there are many causality based experiments in Quantum Mechanics relating to things like entanglement that change the outcome based on just the ability to observe the result. This doesn't really surprise me.
It's like a million 1s cried out in pain and were suddenly silenced...
It all looks pretty thin to me - there's not a lot of data to be had from the Princeton site.
A quote that might be relevant here:
'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' (Arthur C. Clarke)
We do a lot of work in our research group looking for correlations between parameters in complex systems. The 'schoolboy' error is to see two traces with lots of peaks and troughs, pick two which happen to occur at the same time and say 'hey, there's a correlation'. No, it isn't.
How can you say they're not true random number generators? Perhaps the slice of the random number set their generating simply happens to be -- randomly -- biased towards Sses? I mean we've all seen at the crap tables 'random' number sets that're biased towards or away from 7s, yes?
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
How're you getting random numbers out of perl, hey?
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Just look at the source. :-D
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
All we need to see if this experiment is valid is the experimental data and that can be checked against various statistical methods (like chi-squared maybe) and correlated against the mangitude of the event. Perhaps even geographical factors come into play. If it's science, it can be proven with science - and there's no real reason to believe it isn't science just because our present understanding is so limited.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
B|N>K
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Yeah, sure. I'll believe it when I see all of the people involved sitting on a tropical island they just bought with drinks in their hands being served by half-naked beautiful members of the appropriate sex because they have predicted the lottery numbers. Until then, forgive me for being less than impressed.
Anyone read Greg Egan's quarantine? It's basically the same idea, except Egan's book is a work of fiction. Somehow it's a whole lot more plausible, based on the idea of changing one tiny, tiny quantum event.
Article by Claus Larsen is here:
t m
http://www.skepticreport.com/psychics/radin2002.h
Makes a number of strong points.
Peter
This is a trivial statement. If n flips has m total disparities, n+x flips will have between m and m+x disparities. It is therefore impossible for the total number of disparities to decrease, and almost guaranteed that it will increase.
Except that one disparity can counteract another. A tail on a coinflip is an anti-head, if you like.
Imagine your first n flips come up heads. You then have m=n 'disparities' as you call them.
You flip a further x=n times which come up tails. You have no disparities remaining.
http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/
Now you just have to decipher what they're telling you.
Silicon Ouiji boards.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
It seems to me that the most televised events are also the ones generating the most dramatic results. It would be interesting to surround one of these eggs with a bunch of televisions and see what the various electronic emissions does to the random numbers. Something must happen when a billion televisions are turned on at approcimately the same time....
I read the article. I was expecting to hear some more solid facts on it.
For example, what is this phenomenon that shows up before major world events? If it's one's and zero's, what weird stuff is happening? Are more 1's showing up than 0's?
Instead. I get to RTFA and find that it actually says absolutely nothing about what it is that is indicating that these events are going to occur.
Also, there are a number of factors that can be taken to make the box "seem" as if it is predicting these numbers. For one, the range of time analyzed. For two, the proximity to the "world event". For 911, the article talks about sequences just shortly before the planes hit, making it sound like they were using a minute by minute or hour by hour comparison. For the tsunami, they talk about the week leading up to the tsunami. It would seem to me that if you had a world event, then went back and analyzed the data, you could conjure up something interesting after some time.
What I'd like to see is any mailing list chatter those who worked on this project had prior to 911 and the tsunami. Seeing things along the lines of: "Hey, did you check out the day by days lately? Looks like something big is going to happen!" before the tsunami would lend more credibility to their claims.
Also, it would be VERY interesting to see if what they claim as an indicator that 911 was going to happen is a sequence that has happened either previously or since, and what, if any events happened the day of.
My guess is they are being very selective and not releasing their actual data because the whole thing is hogwash.
It sounds funny, I know,
But it really is so,
Oh, I'm my own grandpa.
I'm my own grandpa.
I'm my own grandpa.
It sounds funny, I know,
But it really is so,
Oh, I'm my own grandpa.
Now many, many years ago, when I was twenty-three,
I was married to a widow who was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grown-up daughter who had hair of red.
My father fell in love with her, and soon they, too, were wed.
This made my dad my son-in-law and changed my very life,
My daughter was my mother, cause she was my father's wife.
To complicate the matter, even though it brought me joy,
I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.
My little baby then became a brother-in-law to Dad,
And so became my uncle, though it made me very sad.
For if he was my uncle, then that also made him brother
Of the widow's grown-up daughter, who, of course, was my stepmother.
Father's wife then had a son who kept him on the run,
And he became my grandchild, for he was my daughter's son.
My wife is now my mother's mother, and it makes me blue,
Because, although she is my wife, she's my grandmother, too.
Now if my wife is my grandmother, then I'm her grandchild,
And everytime I think of it, it nearly drives me wild,
For now I have become the strangest case you ever saw
As husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpa!
I'm my own grandpa.
I'm my own grandpa.
It sounds funny, I know, but it really is so,
Oh, I'm my own grandpa.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
http://www.ncas.org/erab/index.html
Way to boost your reputation and future career prospects.
OK, I have been reading most of these comments and chuckling. But this one little phrase:
...see the individual sparkles (i.e. the future).
Set me off into the giggles. Subtle and brilliant. Thanks for the laugh.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
From http://www.princeton.edu/~rdnelson/:
The PEAR program has used three generations of random event generators, with different primary sources of white noise, but important common features of design. The original "benchmark" experiment used a commercial random source developed by Elgenco, Inc., the core of which is proprietary. Elgenco's engineering staff describe the proprietary module as "solid state junctions with precision pre-amplifiers," implying processes that rely on quantum tunneling to produce an unpredictable, broad-spectrum white noise in the form of low-amplitude voltage fluctuations. The PEAR Portable REG uses Johnson noise in resistors, which is so-called "thermal noise" and is also a quantum level phenomenon that produces a well-behaved broad-spectrum fluctuation. The PEAR Micro-REG uses a field effect transistor (FET) for the primary noise source, again relying on quantum tunneling, and providing completely uncorrelated fundamental events that compound to an unpredictable voltage fluctuation.
At least it doesn't sound like a pseudo-random generator.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
...Pseudoscience has now arrived on Slashdot. Of course, the convenient element of this I suppose is that when I want to laugh in future, I'll no longer need to visit both here *and* crank.net.
The commencement of covering American politics was in itself a major indication of the intellectual decline of this site, compared with times past...If stories like these begin making their appearance on a regular basis, I find myself wondering how long it will be before Slashdot becomes largely worthless. I suppose I could simply edit my settings to screen out submissions by Zonk, but that isn't really a solution...From what I'm seeing, he's only the latest symptom, rather than the disease itself. And yes, to those of you with modpoints at the moment who *shouldn't* have them on the grounds of your being groupthinking, conformist sheep, mod me troll with my blessing, as I know you will...as you always do when I or anyone else makes a post of this nature.
... The machine felt a great distrubance in the force. As if millions of voices cried out and weren't silenced.
However this just proves once again that Yoda was in fact correct as we always expected. The future is always just emotion.
Quite a few, according to this interesting, skeptical report
Seriously though... I'm curious, if it were a psychic amplifier, If everyone had one, and it could tell us when everyone saw some big event in the future. We would need to make sure a feedback loop could not occur. Otherwise I could see someone stubbing their toe. They would emotionally react. 100 people would sense it. React to it slightly. A 100,000 would sense it react to their reaction. In a matter of hours the whole planet wired into this psychic force detector would generate a phenomenon of unprecedented proportions.
OH wait... thats the media.
Cops and ER personnel have claimed for decades that crime rates, accidents, etc., all tend to increase slightly when there is a full moon.
I wonder if there are spikes that correlate to lunar cycles?
http://www.random.org/stats/11september.html
Can it predict whether I will, at some future time, welcome our new future-predicting overlords?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sound cards are common these days. Their recording noise can be used as a random number generator, does not it?
So let's write the software and make a grid to test it ;D
BTW, yesterday I have supposed that one guy did receive ESP, too ;D Seriously, that guy had written some insightful comments, but perhaps this is their somewhat "drifting" style. So many people though "prom" while reading the story and perhaps he got influenced :D
Either you're trying to be funny or you forgot what's in your sig, if anything's wishful thinking and in need of a clue, it's that time cube thing. I spent the time to read it, at least the folks in the Global Consciousness Project sound like they're trying to prove or disprove this, as opposed the time cube's whole "this is true, you just don't know it yet" attitude. (And corresponding lack of real data to go with that attitude.)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
People who can truly predict the future would not admit it. Every body has the ability. When pouring a glass of milk it is used.Its only numbers.a person could not survive without it. Its the speed involved to crunch these numbers that is the answer.It is not that time flows backwards.Because the present is a product of the past. They should use three numbers in that box.
A machine is not going to zero in on the details of a human tragedy and respond wildly to it.
/. would be less gullible than this.
To a machine, a human dying is merely a change in how carbon atoms are being redeposited in the universe.
Wouldn't it be reacting wildly to something else.. like a thunderstorm? Why would it zero in on a tiny little plane flying into a building? That is utterly insignificant--and a relatively artifical "event"--on the global scale of things. The only thing that makes it significant to US is human social behavior. We made it a tragedy because we mourned their loss, not because it was a huge explosion that rocked the earth or anything like that.
This is total BS. I thought
Where are you when I need you, James Randi?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
At this time number of people thinking about this is bigger than average. I wonder if that infuences eggs?
And in recent news, 2 hours before the article was posted, the eggs suddenly display huge spikes in the random numbers! Could this be a sudden dirty bomb attack by terrorists? Will the Terror Alert be tied to the Black Box? Oh wait, thats just the thousands of slashdot users spiking the electric grid.
How would you like the USA to be guided by witches and warlocks?
Is there any difference?
US national policy is based on beliefs. "We good - others are bad and evil!"
One of the leaders is a "born again christian", the others are warlords, so tell me what's the difference?
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
They can also perform a blind experiment in which the box is enclosed in a cupboard for a year. Meanwhile the researchers look in the newspapers to register notable events. Finally they take the box out of the cupboard and compare the results. Strong corellation should lead to the Randi price (or at least to the experiment being repeated)
Black thingie that can foretell the future?
I bought one of those once: http://www.shuchow.com/eightball.html
You can't do a controlled study to test them (clearly false, James Randi does it)
OR
When such studies are done, they show that ESP and the like are all horsefeathers (see above)?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Good -- because, as we all know...
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance"
-Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Bridge National Laboratory
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
What kinda horseshit is this? I mean, slashdot's seen some lows, but cmon.. Did Zonk just *have* to go find another article to claim the entire front page or what?
Thought this was "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Not News for lonely housewives at the grocery store checkout..
I almost thought I mighta fell asleep for a month and it was 04-01 or something.
Get a clue and dont post this lame shit no more.
-pAth0s
Is it possible that the eggs actually cause these events that they apparently predicted? They must be evil. Destroy them immediately.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
My inner artist (I'm a composer) has witnessed first hand some of the finest products of the human mind (such as Bach's music) and is excited at the unrealised potential it has, being the most complex known thing in the universe. The (probably unrealisable) aim of my music is to blow people away like the music of Bach, the art of Michaelangelo and the teachings of Jesus (or Buddah for that matter) have. A number of minds working the same goal (like an orchestra where every player is a magnificent musician) has even more potential.
/. But if a number of respected scientists publish this data and are happy to have the sceptics scrutinise and try to duplicate the results, I'll be a happy artist.
My inner scientist is sceptical and wonders what the previous paragraph is doing on
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
If you want supporting evidence, just look in the mirror.
Oh, let's see... I think we can call this an adventure in finding out just how provential you're knowledge of global daily events actualy is...
If you sampled the world's significant events, I think you'd find that the world, as a whole, what we could probably consider a "significant event" several times a day. Some of these get reported; so don't depending on your new market.
Rig up a random number generator with a periodic, large drift and coralate with whatever you deem "significant" write a paper, rinse, wash repate for the next 20 years growing fat off of the "grants" from the world's rich ecentrics.
Sure it's intellectually dishonest, but at least you don't have to teach so much after you get tenure.
is it pseudorandom generator? or based on radioactive decay? or noise in a transistor? i cannot find that info anywhere
Deliriant isti Americani.
The Spacing Guild's monopoly on interstellar travel.
So they have finally found the Random Number God
Deliriant isti Americani.
> Any stream of random numbers will work. If a
> *special* stream is required, then it's not
> random...
Uh, it's a *special* random stream...
You see, he has people thinking *at* it. This causes the stream to bend one way or another upon the pre-arrival of a "significant event".
Kinda' like annealing a metal.
Jesues... did you sleep through paranormal psychology 101 or what!
Try Jeff Rense intead: http://www.rense.com
Pathetic, really.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
Epidemic? Seriously, that word has no place in the context you used it. If this were an "epidemic", then a large number of scientists would be supporting it. Yet only a small number are. If a great percentage of the world's scientific community supported it, then you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as "pseudoscience bullshit".
I think you confused the data with a +5 Funny for yourself ;)
I'm doubtful that this is any kind of hoax. Do a little 'net research on the people involved in the project. They've been pouring effort into this and other things like it for decades. If it is a hoax, it's one hell of a long-term hoax. Also, if they're studying the gullibility of other scientists, you'd think they would have finished by now, since they've been criticized for about as long as they've been making claims.
In my opinion, it is likely that this is an example of good scientists who've fallen 'victim' to their own desire to believe in the paranormal. They're observing(creating) patterns that they want to see, because when they see something that catches their imaginations, they lose their ability to think critically about the data. I admit that my opinion is largely uninformed -- I haven't looked carefully at everything they've published. But a couple hours of studying their methods and hypotheses leads me to believe I'm right.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky
Please mod parent up.
The given link is an excellent critical analysis of this experiment, and the fact that the experimenter even attempts to bring up the TM-Sidhi cult driven experiment of 1993 should be immediate cause for alarm
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
I do not really know what to exactly think about the discussion.
If we created such machines, then hooked them up to a website, would that create a feedback loop that allowed us to see further into the future?
The machines would pick up the output of the people watching the website about the machine's output changing.
"Random Number Generator". That is a very dubious statement. You see, computers can never be truly random. Whenever a computer generates anything random, it isn't truly random but pseudorandom. When a computer generates a sequence of random numbers, it is based on a random seed, which goes through several math processes. Eventually, this sequence will repeat itself. Even the most advanced so-called random number generators repeat themselves after millions of digits. Computer randomness is never true randomness, and that's why chaotic systems and quantum randomness is so applealing to computer security: Because these things are much more "truly" random. Example: LavaRnd (http://www.lavarnd.org/what/index.html) Considering that the article says that the machine 's chip is "no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators", I find it hard to beleive that this machine is actually random, so even if you don't consider all the other evidence for why this is a hoax, you see that there is a fundemental flaw with this whole theory in the first place.
Lab Assistant: "Hey Peter, the machine went bleep again."
Peter: "Wow, something must be going to happen."
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Argh. Preview button. That should read "BAN THIS SICK FILTH NOW".
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
They know all about this stuff. Oh, wait, that'd actually require people to get humble and admit that perhaps, there is something more to this stuff than meets the eye.
Seriously though. LRH was on to this waaaay ahead of these guys. Not kidding.
There are two problems with this. First, Occam's razor is not a law. It's just a way of saying, 'all other things being equal, choose the simpler hypothesis.'
Very often, the truth ends up being the more complex explanation.
Second, the purpose of religion isn't simply 'describing the world as it is.' It's there to change the world. Think of it like a "prisoner's diellema" from game theory. If you convince two prisoners that they should cooperate using deistic explanations and to not trust other prisoners who don't believe in God then those two prisoners will be more successful because of their cooperation. In this case, "Mutual belief in God and cooperation with coreligionists" is a successful strategy. In the real world, complex beliefs which are beneficial, even if physically meaninless, can be strategically relevant. (Honor, love, God, etc.)
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
20 If it wasn't pseudoscience bullshit, a great percentage of the world's scientific might support it.
30 Goto 10.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It works well in practice. Thre are many machine learning algorithms that utilize this theory.
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Oh I can think of other problems with the Monkey-Shakespeare theory. Here are some:
The earth is not capable of producing enough banannas to support an emperical study of the Monkey-Shakespeare hypothesis. Primarily due to the fact neither the earth or the bannans it supplies are "infinite".
or
Due to random background radiation, the DNA of the species "Monkeies" is not stable enough to performe an exhaustive, brute-force test the Monkey-Shakespeare hypothesis.
or
Due to a combinations of reproductive scalablity, short span between typing age and death and a general inability to concentrate on typing at keyboard all day long, the Monkey-Shakespeare hypothesis can never be tested.
or, referencing item #2:
The Monkey-Shakespeare hypothesis has already been tested successfully (allowing for genetic drift).
And to bring this full circle, that last result leads naturally into the "thought at random number egg generator predicts the future" hypothesis. Now, if I just had an infinite number of gullable people I could convince to think at a random number generator, I could not only preduct the future, I could construct it.
You know... if that's what science is, I think I'd rather sit around all day eating bannans and masterbating to pr0n.
> Random Number Generator That Sees Into the Future
They have found it out at last! I always did it that way, now my secret has been discovered!
As someone pointed out above, Red Nova are merely regurgitating the Daily Mail (look at the bottom of the page). They should really have checked their source's credibility first, as the Daily Mail is one step away from being one of those "Aliens made me have sex with Elvis!" rags
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
"(I don't buy the weaker claim either, but I have to acknowledge that it has an infinitely greater chance of being true than the stronger claim.)"
Caveat: The stronger claim is zero, so multiplying it buy infinity won't help.
The black box is what is called an Oracle, there have been some great ones in the past. Totally useless but I'm sure they will contiune for as long as there are humans.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Why Physicists Can't Fight
How we know is more important than what we know.
Suppose t still shows some tendencies to predict H_n, are you going to construct new ones until it doesn't?
FRA: STFU GTFO
I read somewhere, several news picked it up, that before the dec '26 Tsunami all the animals legged it inland. They knew somehow and scarped to a position of safety.
Lots of people report feeling 'uneasy' before major disasters - maybe there is more to this then at first glance.
No, for the same reason that 50% of the population couldn't have a hysterectomy.
Digital monkeys do a pretty reasonable job though (Java applet - simulates monkeys & keyboards, searches for Shakespeare)
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Of Hooey.
The BS is so deep that if I jumped off the Sears Tower, I'd fall only 10 feet before my toes turned brown.
To top it off, TFA goes on and on about how seemingly unconnected events influenced the graphs. WELL THEY ARE UNCONNECTED! It's the damn experimenter that is projecting his biases on what he thinks the results mean.
This warrants front page on Slashdot?
Wow.
--
BMO
If science wasn't exploring the currently inexplicable, how would scientists ever discover any "new" phenomena, eh?
imhe, scepticism is a sure sign of a closing mind
Words to men, as air to birds.
This sounds like a Jewish telegram
They read "start worrying, details to follow."
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
At the very least I want to know how to generate a stream of random numbers that reproduces this effect
That's really the problem, isn't it? To generate a true random stream of numbers is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. How are all these "eggs" creating random numbers? If they're using the same method of creating random numbers, of course they will find similar conclusions.
Once all these "eggs" discover a flucuation pattern, one need only read the newspapers and 'select the data' that these flucuations are responding to. They're simply selecting their data.
This isn't just bad science, this is stupid science.
There may be a way to independently verify that the actions of a collective consciousness can influence random number generators. In the UK, a government run savings bank (www.nsandi.com) sells Premium Bonds that each month pay out a prize of one million pounds. The draw is run on a random number generator called ERNIE (the original of which was buit at Dollis Hill where COLOSSUS was born). As you can imagine, great care is taken to ensure the randomness of the results. However, if we all concentrate on a single bond number (which I will be happy to supply), I believe we can demonstrate that these machines can be influenced. The arrival of the cheque on my doormat will be conclusive proof.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
...does the Oracle always predict a "slow news" day, like the day the article was written?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
For those of you that have not spent some time reading Knuth's Vol.2, there is an extensive analysis of what "randomness" is and how to get it. Clearly, a deterministic machine (=chip) cannot produce really random sequences. I did not bother to check the actual working details of those machines, but I would say that the only truly random phenomena are quantum phenomena and only these would be acceptable in a serious scientific study. Sure, modern chips get away by generating random-like sequences that are good enough to simulate true randomness for most purposes. This applies to HW random generators in most PCs. However, they are not, in principle, acceptable as real random number generators (even if they are equally well suited for applications).
From a theoretical standpoint a truly random quantum system is immune to interference, while HW random number generators use an external (to the system) source of randomness, accepted to represent noise. This is the actual approach used in the kernel's /dev/random that draws data from various external events. It has been shown, under some circumstances to be less than reliable, because the event is external wrt to the kernel but still inside our frame of reference (e.g. we control the keyboard and the ethernet port and, potentially, the power fluctuations etc etc).
Another significant point to consider is this: a truly random sequence is by definition infinite and it contains all possible subsequences of finite length. In an infinite series of coin tosses we MUST get all finitely long sequences of heads-only or tails-only. This means that given a long enough random subsequence (like the one that is produced by this machine), we will always be able to choose parts of it that are highly unlikely and statistically significantly different. Given that (a) every day something "important" happens somewhere and (b) we can always choose non-random "looking" parts of the sequence the credibility of this experiment is quite doubtful.
A proper experimental design would not associate (chosen!) events with (chosen!) subsequences, but would instead prove that the source itself is systematically non-random due to an unknown cause of interference. When all reasonable measures have been taken to reduce traditional sources of interference, we would be open to creative speculation about its source.
Another way to approach this is to make "a priori" (very important!) choices of "trigger" events and then assign very specific, "a priori" defined, time limits to the analysis. E.g. violent death of more than 1000 people in less than 1 hour is accepted as a trigger and we only correlate this to a contiguous 2h of data surrounding and including the event. The prior choice of experimental trigger conditions and rules makes a world of difference to the reliability of the test.
P.
You might be interested in the independent analysis of the Sept. 11 claims posted here:
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/papers/Sep1101.pdf
The bottom line:
The "prediction" was a complete coincidence.
I have predicted this article 2 days ago...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And maybe you should ask those questions directly to the scientists involved. Who knows, they might even reply :)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Ha, that link predicts that my browser will crash when I visit it! And it does, every time... Safari 1.2.4 on OsX 10.3.7
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
"They might help provide a solid scientific grounding for such strange phenomena as 'deja vu', intuition and a host of other curiosities that we have all experienced from time to time." Why do we need another explanation for deja vu? I already thought that was resolved, I read it happened cuz of some delay between the singals reaching both halves of the brain, isn't that it?
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
Non random, random number generators
Did he inhale?
Layman's answer: tails. It's got to balance out eventually, right?
Pure mathematician: impossible to say, each throw is an independent event.
Applied mathematician: heads, it's a trick coin.
1/3 of jokes get modded OT. If you get the joke, mod 1 in 3 insightful/interesting/underrated to restore karma balance.
Sounds like a fair price.
Sorry, Einstein got there first. E=mc^2 is only the first term of an infinite series. I don't know off hand what the generator is for the rest of the function is.
In other words, E=mc^2 is a very good approximation for the relation between energy and mass, but it's not the whole story.
Sorry. A bunch of random numbers made me say it.
How about "I'll investigate it more seriously when then properly define what they're trying to measure?"
'more seriously when then properly ' should read 'more seriously when they properly '
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
This little black box isn't that impressive. I've had a little black sphere that can do the same thing for years.
Unless the box shape somehow solves the frequent "Reply hazy. Ask again later." problem. Then I'd be impressed
how do they establish a baseline? :)
I knew you were going to say that. More evidence that the black box theory is correct.
For instance you need to toss a coin a minimum of 20 times to have even the possibility of achieving 1:1,000,000 odds (1:1048576, actually 2^20). You would need to toss a good many more times than that before you could legitmately begin to worry of a 1:1,000,000 occurence did not show up.
WTF? The probability of a 1:1,000,000 occurence is always 1:1,000,000 by definition.
You actually misunderstood the grandparent post, then said exactly what it said, then made a completely nonsense statement. Good job.
(Variance increases == likely deviation from the mean increases. Percentage variation from the mean decreases, absolute variation increases. That's all the grandparent post was saying).
Not having heard of that movie I decided to look it up on IMDB (I'm in the UK.. it hasn't hit here yet)
Sounds like a total crapflood of psuedoscience and nonsense. I found a great line on the IMDB messageboard that seems to sum it up well though:
"I didn't think it was possible to offend scientists, atheists and theists all at the same time... but walking out of the theatre, I realized this film had accomplished precisely that."
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Really, between this and the magic battery stickers (not to mention everyone's misunderstanding of biology and physics), I think we've got conclusive evidence that Slashdot has jumped the shark. Anyone have suggestions for other tech news sites, ones which can differentiate science and pseudoscience?
provide some evidence backing your theory up and you just might...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I actually spent 5 minutes reading the article. I want that time back. Can their stupid random number generator do that for me?
I'm a big tall mofo.
They have a link to a Princeton study about Global Conciousness at the bottom. Upon reading information at that link, I think this proves that not everything coming out of Princeton is gold, unfortunately.
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
Quick: What was the biggest war in the last ten years?
Ruanda. The Tutsi/Hutu masacre. A huge mass histeria with millions dead, slaughtered by machetes and clubs.
Hardly anyone in the western world cared or even noticed.
I wonder if that 'big event' showed up on their future prediction device.
There are a massive amount of really BIG events going on that people of the 'western culture' don't even notice. I'm absolutely shure I'd have no problem finding events I consider eventfull to be cohering with some gadgets random twitching.
Let's get this straight: Earthquakes are predictable. It's pratically proven that they cause changes of electrical state in the atmosphere in the places they are about to occur. (Nearly no animals were killed in the recent Tsunami) The near and even distant future of individuals and societies is - to an astonishing extent - predictable for people who have their senses trained to people and societies and the way the thing we call destiny unfolds around the biography and psychology of individuals and groups of people. And I'm 100% shure that disasters (natural and man-made) are foreseeable aswell. But I don't think a box churning out random numbers is anywhere near to predicting the future.
On the other hand, a box churning out random numbers could be to a scientist what a cristal ball is to a fortuneteller. A thing ocultists call a 'focus'. Not a device that forsees, but a device that is used by people to tune their senses in on states, movements and conditions that lie behind what is directly apparent to the eye.
There is nothing unscientific about - as it at first appears - being able 'to predict the future'. Much unlike it is magic for Steve Jobs to build a product that will make him rich because he seemingly 'instictively' knows what people will like and buy.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Listen friends, the only way to 'predict' the future is to simulate the entire universe. You need a computer larger than the universe to do it. You can limit to simulating only the time cone around planet Earth. Then you can cut down the number of atoms (quarks?) needed to be simulated by a lot. Still it is impossible. There is nothing random about the future. This whole issue is loads of crapts.
this guy seemed like a real scientist until the end of the article, where he makes the curious statement: "We're taught to be individualistic monsters,' he says. 'We're driven by society to separate ourselves from each other. That's not right." at that point i was more eager to write off his results as nonsense.
Seriously people, get a grip. Blondlot and N-rays story is repeating again and again. Someone, please, hit those Princeton morons with a clue stick.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Well, fortunately a beating of the odds of one million to one crops up nine times out of ten. Well known fact in fact.
I want to build one; if, for anything, lotto picks.
mmm... grumblecakes.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Predictions are predictions. Observing a deviation and finding a historic event to match is not a prediction.
A prediction is saying something about something which hasn't happen yet. Saying "stuff will happen" is not a prediction, because there will always be some event you can associate with what you've previously observed. In order for this machine to predict something you need more information than just "Stuff will happen".
A witty
1 Examine thousands of "random" number streams.
2 Find one that appears to predict events reported by cnn.
3 Present it to the public and apply for grants.
4 Profit!!!
Sounds like somebody at the University has been reading too much of the Foundation series. This is sounds a lot like Psychohistory. They even have a little black box that puts out mathmatical events (like the Prime Radiant in the Asimov stories)
With an infinite number of universes, we require, on average, less than 1 monkey per universe, typing for less than a day. In other words, in some universe, it's already happened.
--
is that they've discovered how to get funding for this bullshit. Some people will do anything to make a buck.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I don't know, it seems to me they have these boxes which produce generally produce 1's and 0's in equal proportions but occasionally produce them in unequal proportions.
Rather than studying why that it is, e.g. by looking at how the 1's and 0's are generated for example it seems they have jumped to the conclusion that they must be measuring some kind of pyschic energy which no one has yet shown to exist. I am finding it hard to equate that with a scientific method.
Really want to know?
Without F.U.D, life is Vanilla, lukewarm.. no mystery, no fun..
It may be that Red Nova is a valid news site, but they should really check the status of their sources.
My thoughts exactly. What amazes me here is that this is a variation of the Sokal hoax that recently got aired on Slashdot.
It may be the case that something is happening around these world-changing events that the random number generator is detecting but correlation does not imply causation. The machine could be picking up on anything as much as it could be picking up a "global consciousness."
If people are also able to change the behavior of the machine simply by thinking about it then what about people not near the machine, say in their own living rooms, who think about the machine. Is knowledge of its location important? It would seem not given this is a global consciousness machine.
What I'm really struck by is how similar this machine sounds to a the Nefastis machine described by Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49. For my money, all of the handwaving in the posts above demonstrate that most human belief is not based on fact but on prejudice and bias. Even those claiming to have scientific orientation are susceptible to bad methodology, unsubstantiated claims, and just plain foolishness.
Global consciousness machine, indeed.
blog
Please, everything isn't that simple. If you want to argue that this is pseudo-science at all, try to use more valid argument. J. Peter Lassila Owner of PSI Research Group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PSI_research/post
EOM
What it's doing on Slashdot, and not The Onion, I don't know.
I'm just trying to browse the given link and I get every time AV in mshtml.dll.
IT IS TRUE! THAT BLACK BOX CAN PREDICT FUTURE!!!
Now I know!. In the close future I'll install Firefox.
Looking at how when I was at work and Diana's funeral was on, a lot of people for some odd reason seemed to go to pieces... now I don't live my life through the glamour of others so I don't have any of those issues, and you probably do not either. We may even collectively PUKE over the thought that Diana was "as important" as "oooh poor US 9/11" but the fact remains that a lot of people seemed to care... and a lot of people mourned her.
The whole point of what they said was that it had nothing to do with US... If a billion people are exposed to a funeral of some person they remotely knew... its likely that at least a large ratio will react strongly. Same as with 9/11 footage (which our government uses to extort emotional responses from the weak minded on a daily basis without any "science" involved from their part).
JOKE EXAMPLE:
--"Sir, we can't go take the iraqi's oil and finish daddy's crusade!! The people want Osama, not Saddama!!"
--"Oh yeah?? Play the 9/11 footage plus some sad music and declare all who oppose the war, unpatriotic and in league with those EVIL killers!" --"Yes sir!"
RESULT: (a few weeks later we're at war with a nigh unanimous decision by people more afraid of political suicide than to send hapless teenage fools to their horrid deaths...)
I tune out a lot too, but judging by TFA alone, they said the reaction to Diana was predicted while it was occuring, might've been RF issues.
9/11 they say was producing a reaction quite a bit of time ahead... not minutes or seconds or as it happened.
9/11 was something allowed to happen so there would be something to sway a mindless mob here in the USA... much like the "Coliseum is the heart of the Plebes, the heart of Rome..." so it is with the americans... Televiseum is the heart of the USA's mob... sway it, and you sway their unquestioning loyalties. It is nice to know that 9/11 is a world defining event. I mean, its not like terrorism hasn't existed or even been USED by america to achieve its global aims... its just that now, our leaders used it to achieve THEIR ends HERE... AT HOME.
I'm tired of ranting, I've laundry to do... 1984's perpetual war is here... Oceania IS at war with Eastasia/Eurasia, Big Brother IS watching you, the people who voted for Bush are generally easilly swayed sheep, who vote based on religious party lines and less on facts... but then again, if its on TV and on Forbes and GQ... well... it MUST be true!!
Farewell oh sheep of they who pay orators to sway your blind loyalties to the empty promises of a priest or wannabe christian messiah.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
What's really funny/sad about this is that these poor bastards are projecting so hard that when they finally got some "events" that couldn't be explained by anything going on in the world at the time they just changed the rules to allow correlation with events in the future. I don't know whether to laugh or puke.
That's bollocks. The article points out that the selection of events as "major" seems to be done after looking at the RNG output ("You are selecting your data.") rather than blind.
The Global Consciousness Project's web site does not emphasize what you say it claims. It emphasizes the data points that support the affirmative hypothesis. There are no graphs showing how many "hits" there were during, say, all of September 2001 -- just on the 11th.
Addition: Any non-uniform stream of random numbers. Ok, so you can probably rule out uniform streams anyways as they are supposed to be random, but if we look at the stream [1,1,1,1,1,1,1....] then this is the stream of significant or newsworthy events - consider, how many days does the news get cancelled. So now as long as our random stream contains 'events' most days - result. That is why the 'research' is bollocks, although it is being done in a more scientific manner than most psuedo-science. They give the parameters of their RNG on their website, I can't really be bothered to work it out but with 1 sample per second, and a SD of sqrt(50) they are going to get lots of 'significant' readings in a given day.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I think he's taking the piss. The timecube thing looks like something written by someone who is mentally ill.
Dr John Hartwell, working at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, was the first to uncover evidence that people could sense the future. In the mid-1970s he hooked people up to hospital scanning machines so that he could study their brainwave patterns.
He began by showing them a sequence of provocative cartoon drawings.
When the pictures were shown, the machines registered the subject's brainwaves as they reacted strongly to the images before them. This was to be expected.
Far less easy to explain was the fact that in many cases, these dramatic patterns began to register a few seconds before each of the pictures were even flashed up.
It was as though Dr Hartwell's case studies were somehow seeing into the future, and detecting when the next shocking image would be shown next.
It was extraordinary - and seemingly inexplicable.
Seemingly inexplicable?! I always keep an open mind about these things, but this supposed example of precognition is too easy to explain.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I think any beginning Psychology student should be able to recognize those results as a simple example of classical conditioning. After being shown several "provocative" images in succession, it should be expected that participants will begin to anticipate another such image before they see it.
It would have been more interesting if they used some provocative and some non-provocative pictures, and saw different pre-reactions depending on which image was coming up. Sadly, the description in the article makes it sound like that research (and the similar research the article explains next) didn't bother mixing in different types of pictures. So much for control groups....
If you read far enough, you'll see that their random number generators are: (get the Pampers ready)
- A proprietary box, probably using a noisy Zener diode.
- Another design, using a noisy resistor.
- Another Zener diode.
In case you havent guessed, all of the above devices are very sensitive to temperature, light, nuclear radiation, and electromagnetic interference.Those devices have been extensively studied, and every EE knows that even if they are shielded from all those influences, they generate several different kinds of noise: white noise, 1/f noise, and "popcorn noise:". Funny, but that information doesnt show up in The Fine Articles.
When info known for over 50 years and taught in every third-year EE class doesnt show up in an allegedly scientific study, one wonders.
You'll notice they don't use a truly unjoggable source of random numbers, such as a beta emitter.
Oh, and of course, it's no trick to look back and find a spike AFTER a momentous event.
I'm a telepath
<AdmiralPJ> I can predict things before they happen
<AdmiralPJ> yes i know
<ari> That's precognition, not telepathy
<ari> Ah, damnit...
<ari> Good one
So they look for a major event.
Then they look on their graph for a spike at that time.
If there is a spike but not at the time the event took place then it is evidence that the machine is predicting the future.
If there is a spike and it is at the right time then the machine has detected a global conciousness
If there is no spike anywhere near the event then the machine must just not have registered that event.
I don't see how you can lose with a process like that.
I learned it under the axiom, "chance has no memory". Legions of would be lottery millionares are stung by this every day.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
j_w_d (114171) apparently wrote that:
:-)
"If the probability is 1:1,000,000, then in one million experiments there is a finite probability (1:1,000,000) that you may see the event once, and a lesser finite probability you would see it more than once."
Are you sure you mean this? My caclculater says that if you perform a 1/1,000,000 experiment 1,000,000 times, then the chances of you never seeing the event is approx 0.37 It follows that the chance of seeing the event once or more is 0.63 - better watch out for flying erasers
http://www.skepticreport.com/print/radin2002-p.htm
After reading this, the Global Conscious Project does not seem to be too true.
There's nothing new here. This phenomenon was well known to the ancients
Jonah 1:7 And they said every one to his fellow,
Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.
We all know that the collection of "cast lots" is distributed randomly, but here we see that the ancients believed that such random sets could reliably predict the future. Even Jonah went along with this and cheerfully let himself be cast into the whales belly!
-Johanus
You're probably talking about a spinthariscope. See: http://www.unitednuclear.com/spinthariscope.htm if you want one. They've got other cool nuclear stuff too.
I think a greater point that is being missed in this article is whether these numbers are truely random. If these numbers can predict large scale events, then there is a pattern within the numbers. So are these numbers which are being spat out truely random?
I know I'm posting way too late for this to be read but this is a claim that just begs to be tested.
When I thought about doing the test myself though, I immediately ran into a problem. I"m not sure I can build a truly "random" event generator. Maybe a mechanical coin flipper, but is that random? If the machine throws it the same way, won't a patten be established?
It is this issue that makes me skeptical, but only to the extent that I'd want to see the test set up and results myself.
Still, I"m not discounting it at this time. It's compelling enough to be worth a further look.
On the other hand, if these guys can generate truly random events, I'm sure the DOD would be very interested - imagine the implications to cryptography.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
the number of states the generator can be in is finite and we do have an infinity of world events ... so we have established that there cannot be a one to one correspondance between the states of the generator and future .... which implies that even if we can "predict" an event of world importance is to occour, we will never be able to pin point what event ... which bring us to square one and tells us "future is random" which is in agreement with chaos theory ....
Interesting, but show me the data you used to "debunk" this. You can speculate anything you want, but without supporting evidence, your theory doesn't hold weight.
I'm skeptical about this of course, but I do not think we can debunk it just yet.
Just keep Ben Affleck the hell away from it!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Why not "file" ? :-)
I don't have any evidence, but I'm at Princeton - is that good enough?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
-
http://www.jsasoc.com/docs/Sep1101.pdf
and
-
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/papers/jseScargle.
p df
for an independent and critical analysis of the original data of the Global Consciousness Project.This is nothing new. The ancients believed that random events could predict the future:
Jonah 1:7 And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.
It is well known that the collection of "cast lots" is distributed randomly, but the ancients believed that everything happened for a purpose. Thus Jonah cheerfully accepted this random verdict as truth as he was thrown into the whale's belly!
-Johanus
It says that large enough random data will eventually generate data with a specific meaning to us. Check out this paper from the University of Texas.
;-)
One of my science group teammates in the Faculty of Engineering, UNAM already worked on this phenomenon. They built an associative machine (AI pattern recognition program) using a block of memory filled with random data.
In short, Ramsey Theory is nothing but the scientific explanation behind the Bible Code: It's RANDOM DATA. Period.
Well, the guys at Princeton just earned a "-5, stupid" moderation from me. Bet they didn't predict this
I wonder if we can crash the eggs by thinking about them real hard... :-D
My question is more like do we think that we are so very special that we effect the entire space time continuum with our very presence?
I don't think the universe is that poorly designed.
~X~
~X~
To really test the system all they need to do is predict when Debian Sarge will be released.
I would like detailed instructions on how to construct a stream of random numbers with behaviors that correlate to outside events as they describe, so that I can repeat their experiments myself and see if I can reproduce the same effect.
If you read (as in internalized and put meaning to) the article.
A) the machines were not "built with behaviors that correlate" it was a noticed phenomena of the device.
B) Many scientists have made the boxes and are getting similar results. Thus the phenomenon is readily reproduced.
C) the scientists are hard at work to produce other hypotheses or at least disprove the current one (pretty much the definition of the scientific method)
Nostradamus did nothing involoving random numbers and his predictions were far easier to apply to events than these.
Re your sig: a quick CTRL+, CTRL- will fix Slashdot in Firefox.. but yes, I agree it's ironic that Slashdot of all sites renders like crap in Firefox
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
I'm proposing that the generator is somehow tapping into the realm of probabilities. That it is detecting when probabilities are narrowing at certain times, allowing major world-changing events to come together. This kind of links in with participatory/final anthropic principle, and multiple universes (whether they are tied together by string theory's yet unseen dimensions).
From those articles, it seems the existence of our consciousness threatens reality itself in its current form. Then again, this could all be like Kepler's "six planets" theories, or describing the sun as Zeus's son on a sky chariot.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
It's true that in our current understanding of physics at the quantom level that many events seem to have no time preference. In fact a long standing theory was that ALL events at the quantom level should happen the same forward as backwards, in effect, quarks forming a particle should look like a particle decaying in reverse.
Recent research though has shown that some quantom events do indeed have a time preference, and prefer to happen one way. IE, certain particles seem to decay in a manner different from the way in which they formed.
Also maybe relevant, our laws governing electromagnetism allow not only for waves to radiate outward to a destination, but also to arrive in reverse. Current theories say that we don't recieve waves like this due to massive interference, and any attempt to detect these waves has failed.
My point is, maybe this really will help us understand time maybe just a little better. Because the jury is still out on most of it's conundrums.
Of course the article doesn't go into the mathematical formulae that are being used. Being a skeptic by nature, I'm assuming that different math could also be applied to the series of ones and zeros (i.e. "coin flips" produced by the black boxes) to detect peaks during the most uneventful times of the year -- but they don't want to do that because it's less newsworthy.
I don't know what is in the boxes they are using, but the http://lavarnd.org/ project is a high quality randon number generator you can easily build.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
This is about the worst bullshit I've ever seen. I can't believe that Princeton is actually involved in stuff like that. What a waste of time and money.
Joke or BS. But definately this shouldn't be in the "Technology" section of ./
how we can compare the World Trade Center destruction to the tsunami disaster. After all, around 2,000 people died at the World Trade Center. Indonesia alone is reporting 241,687 dead and missing. Sri Lanka is reporting "more than 30,000" dead. India is reporting "over 14,000" dead, although this is from an old article and is most certainly out of date. A rough estimate, I would guess, is that approximately a third of million people died in the tsunami, making the death (and other devastation) from it have the same proportion to the WTC as the WTC has to Princess Diana's death. This does not in any way lessen the significance of the WTC, nor of the Princess Di's death.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I have just finished reading Karl Popper, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", and he has a lot to say on Probability, and the problem of interpreting Probability statements. I would recommend any one interested to give chapter 8 a good read. In crude summing up of what I have understood, there is no such thing as "random" in a mathematical sense, if we were to define by "Random-infinite-sequence" one from which there is no systematic way of changing its frequency by any means of selecting any sub sequence. IE A sequence impervious to any gambling strategy that one can imagine. It is not at all proven that such a sequence exists at all, and many believe that the set of all such infinite sequences is actually empty. And, were the set not empty, then we would by definition not be able to make any useful mathematical predictions about it anyway, nor apply Bernoulli's "Law of Great Numbers theorem to it. What is a far better definition is "N-Freedom", a far less strict definition where N-tuplets can be extracted from the sequence without changing its frequency. This way of looking at random has been corroborated with observed behavior in physical system of nature... So Far !!
The source of the randomness is quantum events - noise in diodes or transistors, not pseudo-random numbers or
And they do have a list of events, chosen - along with the verification method - a priori.
They claim 4 standard deviations' worth of success for all the events combined - which is something.
I believe that their reluctantness to write anything (yet) in their 'conclusions' section - except that there seems to be something here - is a good sign...
From http://www.princeton.edu.nyud.net:8090/~rdnelson/r eg.html
Detailed construction instructions...
Equipment
The PEAR program has used three generations of random event generators, with different primary sources of white noise, but important common features of design. The original "benchmark" experiment used a commercial random source developed by Elgenco, Inc., the core of which is proprietary. Elgenco's engineering staff describe the proprietary module as "solid state junctions with precision pre-amplifiers," implying processes that rely on quantum tunneling to produce an unpredictable, broad-spectrum white noise in the form of low-amplitude voltage fluctuations. The PEAR Portable REG uses Johnson noise in resistors, which is so-called "thermal noise" and is also a quantum level phenomenon that produces a well-behaved broad-spectrum fluctuation. The PEAR Micro-REG uses a field effect transistor (FET) for the primary noise source, again relying on quantum tunneling, and providing completely uncorrelated fundamental events that compound to an unpredictable voltage fluctuation.
In all cases, the design begins with white noise, for example in the PEAR Portable REG, a flat spectrum +/- 1 db from 1100 Hz to 30 KHz. A low end cutoff at 1000 Hz eliminates frequencies at and below the data-sampling rate. This filtering, together with appropriate amplification and clipping, produces an approximate square wave with unpredictable temporal variation. Sampling at a constant 1 KHz rate is typical, although special sources have been constructed allowing higher rates (up to 2 MHz). Analog and digital processes are completely isolated by alternating these operations to exclude contamination of the analog noise train by digital pulses. To eliminate biases of the mean that might arise from such environmental stresses as temperature change or component aging, an exclusive or (XOR) mask is applied to the digital data stream. This is either an alternating 1/0 pattern or a more complex mask comprising an array of all bytes with equal occurrence of 1/0. Both exclude bias of the mean, in principle, and the latter also excludes all short-lag bit-to-bit and byte-to-byte autocorrelations. Finally, data for the PEAR experiments are recorded as "trials" that are the sum of N samples (e. g., 200 bits) from the primary sequence, thus further mitigating any residual short-lag autocorrelations. The result is a data sequence that conforms to the appropriate theoretical binomial distribution and to its normal approximation.
The final output of the PEAR devices is a sequence of bytes presented to the computer's serial port, which are then formed into a sequence of trials (typically sums of 200 bits), generated at 1 per second. Calibrations on all of the devices show behavior that closely models theoretical expectations for mean, variance, skew and kurtosis.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
I studied under Prof. Chris French mentioned in the article during 93-95 (I'm a Psych/Comp BSc) and we looked at some of the earlier experiments that lead to the 'eggs'. Chris French at that time firmly disbelieved the claims being put forward and tried to show the results were influenced by the experimenter. However the experiments were re-made to eliminate any confounding design problems and still the positive results persisted. It was very strange. In the light of these new results and others it gradually became impossible to explain them other than the 'future effect' was happening somehow. I am amazed that Chris French (the most hardened sceptic there is - a friend of James Randi too) now accepts these results. It is as I thought 10 years ago, when it couldn't be explained away either, - there is something to this. A similar line of research using the internet as a source of liguistic data has revealed prediction abilities too. These results are so good and seemingly accurate there are now for sale at $250 per monthly run from www.halfpasthuman.com. This isn't spam on my part - the offer is now closed but was open nearly all of 2004. Free nuggets can be found from George Ure at UrbanSurvival.com as and when runs are complete. Personally, I have some small knowledge of the weird results of the quantum world and also have been influenced by Jung's work with 'synchronicity'. I've formed these things into some kind of half-baked theory - at least allowing my rational mind to accept these results may have basis in physical reality, but one that we do not understand at all well right now. This was my first post on /. - I never felt qualified before!
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
This whole stuff is like soothsaying from tea leaves. One is just to repeat the "experiment" enough times for it to conincide with anything that might happen. And one can always say when something couldn't be predicted that it wasn't important enought, i.e. not too many people were concerned. On the other side, when spikes "show" something has to happen and nothing important seemed to happen, one could say it did, just nobody has noticed, which is our fault really.
Nostradamus' stuff is quite a bit more "useful", at least it has written words. But they also can be interpreted in so many ways that many of it could be made true and false at the same time.
I can see nothing scientific regarding this "research" whatsoever. Not in methods, not in interpretation. Thus, I can not treat it as having any scientific meaning or implication. And blattering, well, that's something what anybody can do.
If you had tried to tell someone that any two objects have an invisible force between them, and that over small distances the two objects are attracted to each other, that person would probably think you were full of hooey as well. I'm not saying this story is necessarily legit, but just because something doesnt fit into our known world, doesnt mean it is hooey. If that was the case, why do any kind of scientific investigation at all?
KENT: Staring at static on TV for hours at a time. Listening to washing machines. Did you really think these stories wouldn't get out?
ELLIE: I was looking for patterns in the chaos!
The difference between fiction and reality is that reality measures up to scientific scrutiny by your peers. Until these guys make good with their findings in a way that their peers can repeat and measure, they'e just listening to washing machines.
Education is the silver bullet.
I'm beginning to think that the more scientists there are that endorse the theory, the more likely it is to be 100% wrong.
I guess, me and my mom both have a really weird nack for guessing numbers right, not like pick a number, but if somebody says "hey guess what i bowled last night?", id say "uhh 247", and he'd be all "hey how'd you know", and it happens all the time! Do you think we have the ability to see into the futre? but not completely...just like a peripheral futre sight?
Your skill in reading has increased by one point!
Art Bell? Is this like that Taco Bell thing of which I've heard?
The flat line they are talking about is likely a rolling average. With a rolling average when the results are trully random the display will be flat. However when the results break away from randomness the average will tend away from the midline.
This would be the easiest way to graph deviations from true randomness.
The ultimate plays for Madden 2006
Well, I've long wanted a soundtrack for my life. That way, I would know to be careful when the scary music starts. This could be perfect for that!
So, the only question I have left is that did the catastrophes yield ones or zeros?
:-)
Do not agree with you. I have not seen any evidence to support what you claim. Having read the article and having known about this even before the /. posting. There are possibly plenty of times a major deviation happens and there are no major events and there are also times events happen with no major deviation.
Until I see all the data noting any kind of event that could be seen as "major" it's appears to be a case of going back into a huge amount of data and trying to connect the dots by highlighting what you want to find and ignoring that which you don't. Every time there's a deviation they go and actively look to match it to something. Not very scientific to me.
I think that this article debunks it pretty well. There's nothing here that we wouldn't expect to be here. But when you only partially show your hand, giving people what you want to show them, it becomes sensationalistic.
Or yet another awful movie!
...shows the cumulated variance (iirc) - which would be a nearly flat line.
If you want to know how many idiots are out there, anounce that your RNG can predict the future and that the data file is "here," then wait to see how many download it. They're self selected idiots.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
...42.
So are you saying it just uses a procsessor to generate random numbers no sensory equitment at all?
....and pretend that I believe this (I really don't and find the idea complete absurd).
Anyways, as it currently stands this "machine" is completely useless for predicting the future. It doesn't tell you what is going to happen.
"Dr. there is a spike in the data!"
"Quick call the President."
"No Mr. President, its just a spike we don't know what is going to happen, it could be a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, someone rigging an election, or a Slashdot nerd getting lucky."
See, useless.
Indeed, if you take a course in advanced combinatorics you find a number of surprising phenomena. if you assign 1 1 and 0 -1 and plot the sum on y axis and time on x you might think you should get a line close to the x axis that crosses it a number of times. Actually it is much more probable that the line will head away from the x axis. One can calculate the number of times you should expect the axis to be crossed. Unfortunately I cannot remember why this is true or find my notes explaining it but I am quite sure it shouldn't be amazing if you see jumps like that.
They *are* getting statistically signficant result. And these results are hard to refute scientifically (easy to ridicule though). I'm not thinking of the current "predict the future" effect, which I believe is hard to formulate scientifically, but the other similar experiment at PEAR.
However, all of these results live the same place, namely in what I call the borderland of statistics. Very small effects that get significant by huge numbers. Rather than making me believe in a huge future-pedicting global consciuesness, it makes me doubt these areas of statistics. We see a lot of such results from especially medicine. Like eating walnuts is bad for you. Based on a very small effect and a huge population. I tend to ignore these, and only go listen to those things that has a big effect. Like smoking is very unhealthy, you can see that effect with rather small samples.
I'd like to see them make a fortune on the stock market (stock prices should be subject to these effects) or some other practical application before I believe it.
Too bad I didn't have one of these last night... maybe I could have avoided that speeding ticket.
"Passenger: Slow down! The graph just spiked!"
You know all those people who claim that computers "hate" them and/or they get all the bad luck with computer crashes.
Now we have an explanation.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
The second part of what you said is correct: the selecting their data part.
The first part, they did a reasonable job on. Three differnet kinds of real RNGs.
But it's still crap.
Education is the silver bullet.
The method of generating the random numbers is available on the projects website. Here it is:
The PEAR program has used three generations of random event generators, with different primary sources of white noise, but important common features of design. The original "benchmark" experiment used a commercial random source developed by Elgenco, Inc., the core of which is proprietary. Elgenco's engineering staff describe the proprietary module as "solid state junctions with precision pre-amplifiers," implying processes that rely on quantum tunneling to produce an unpredictable, broad-spectrum white noise in the form of low-amplitude voltage fluctuations. The PEAR Portable REG uses Johnson noise in resistors, which is so-called "thermal noise" and is also a quantum level phenomenon that produces a well-behaved broad-spectrum fluctuation. The PEAR Micro-REG uses a field effect transistor (FET) for the primary noise source, again relying on quantum tunneling, and providing completely uncorrelated fundamental events that compound to an unpredictable voltage fluctuation.
What they claim: When lots of people think the same thing it makes "random event generators" give "less random" output.
When pressed about evidence working against his theories (e.g. assigning meaning to some data spies, but not others), global conciousness proponent Dan Radin replied: "I don't know what happened there."
This is the scientific thing to say -- if you don't know, say you don't know.
However, assigning meaning to some spikes, but not others, tends to erode one's confidence in the assignment of causality.
See Skeptic Report for critical analysis.
-kgj
-kgj
Interpolation from the data used _might_ be considered valid from a statistical perspective
Of course, "statistics is not a branch of mathematics" (Press et al, Numerical Recipes in Fortran, 1996)
to use this sort of approach for _extrapolation_ is rediculous
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
The odds of 30 coin flips in any order is a million to one.
You mean 20 coin flips. Or you mean a billion to one. 2^30 is approximately one billion, 2^20 is approximately one million.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Easy, just build a machine that is calculating Pi decimals, supposedely those are random numbers so they must contain the described sequences and behavior.
You can't handle the truth.
Informative is relative, he made a legitimate critique. Too bad the authors of the article didn't make the same obvious mathematical observation. They might have spent their time writing about something useful.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think this article is a little early...
It's 47 more days till April 1st
Eh, sorry, I was typing late, good catch.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
Essentially these guys have been espousing a lottery argument. The odds of me winning Lotto 6/49 are about 14 million to 1. If I win it - there must be some divine influence since it is so unlikely to happen by chance - right?...
The fallacy is that the chance of someone winning the lottery eventually is 100%. Similarly, the chance of some unlikely set of random numbers occurring if you look long enough is 100%. The chance of that this occurs more often than usual if you do it enough times is - you guessed it 100%. It is a sampling thing that is going on here - if I sample non-randomly i.e. based on the result I want - I can get any unlikely result from random data because all results will occur if I wait long enough.
However, I will admit that if I did win a $20 million jackpot I will be more than happy to acknowledge the existence of God...
Maybe the real reason for the PEAR project is to study how the scientific mind can be deluded by wishful thinking, and while they're at it see if they find something else.
Time to elicit the, "But I did read the research, wise-ass!" response, (as he quickly back-tracks to do so and thereby cover his ass. .
If you couldn't, as you claim, see any scientific approach "whatsoever", then you are either blind or you don't know what science is. Did you try actually reading the mountains of material provided by the researchers or are you acting on Faith in your own Beliefs about how the world works when you wrote your canned response?
-FL
This reassuring statement of academic credentials appears in the article:
Well, then, they must be geniuses. In a way, the whole project is an exercise in name-dropping. "I was consulting my random data just the other day, concerning $FAMOUS_THING...".
I wonder if they check to make sure that there is a significant absence of spikes during periods of time that do not correspond to "major events". It seems to me that we're hearing about half an experiment...
Mind the Gap
Could someone point me to a source of the source code of the random number generating algorithms that are used by the scientists?
As this is scientific research, the setup of the experiments are probably open right?(open for introspection by 3rd parties or general people)
So it's free for anyone to look into these algorithms...or is this not the case?
But if so, then i'd like to know where i can find the source code of the used algorithms of these machines.
And i do mean the exact algorithms/source code from these machines, not generally used source code used for programming....i'd like to see the algorithm behind the rand(); functions the scientists use.
Thank you.
This is a trivial statement. If n flips has m total disparities, n+x flips will have between m and m+x disparities. It is therefore impossible for the total number of disparities to decrease, and almost guaranteed that it will increase.
Few things are as embarrassing as people deeming something "trivial" but justifies their belief in it with a completely retarded argument.
Think about what you just wrote for a second and you'll see why it's obviously wrong. Hint: another poster already told you.
Actual science is published in peer-reviewed journals, that's the only way I know to get the scientific community to *consider* whether or not your claims are valid. The one thing I looked for on that website is a list of publications. There are few, in minor journals, and I saw nothing more recent than 1999.
I won't say they are saying BS. I won't even ask the question. Let's wait until they publish something serious, and then we'll see.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
Wouldn't prime numbers be random?
One of their pages says:
"...and the complete database at the end of 2001 occupies approximately 3 gigabytes of storage in a highly compressed form."
I'd love to get my hands on the compression algorithm they use to highly compress those random numbers.
http://www.levity.com/mavericks/quake.htm
Tributsch has suggested that a piezoelectric effect may be at work here. When certain crystals, such as quartz, are arranged in such a way that pressure is applied along certain of the crystal's axes, the distribution of positive and negative ions can shift slightly. In this way pressure changes produce electrical charging of the crystal's surfaces. On the average, the earth's crust consists of 15% quartz, and in certain areas it can be as high as 55%.
-----
According to Tributsch, the piezoelectric effect of the quartz is capable of generating enough electrical energy to account for the creation of airborne ions before and during an earthquake. This electrostatic charging of aerosol particles may be what the animals are reacting to. Animals, also observed acting unusual in similar ways prior to thunderstorms, may have evolved a sensitivity to electrical changes in their environment (Tributsch, 1982).
-----
Electromagnetic noise generated by pizoelectric effects from quartz under stress is also significant. Some Japanese reseracher did experiments on animals by compressing quartz near them and observing their reactions. The animals were isolated from the quartz, so it's not the ions that were causing observed effects.
I'm inclined to say the tsunami prediction by the random number generators is an electomagnetic effect, rather than some psychic ability of a mysterious collective unconsciousness.
Seeing as how the collective consciousness guys are magnifying tiny voltage changes caused by quantum effects in their random generators, let's go with electromagnetic noise from compressed quartz.
There is a short description here, with links:
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/reg.html
Briefly, they are based on electronic fluctuations that get amplified and sampled. The algorithms themselves look quite basic, they just have to ensure that the statistical distribution of the outcome has the desired properties. For instance, XORing the data from two similar generators looks like a good way to get ones and zeroes with equal probability.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
If anything, your observation ought to suggest some validity with regard to the subject.
The general idea is that, "All things are linked in a much broader sense than is explained by current orthodox science." This doesn't necessarily mean there is any magic involved. Being able to label some of the ways random number generation might be affected does not make the phenomenon of planet-wide number spiking cease to exist. Temperature, radiation, EM bursts, light pollution affecting non-random spikes in number generators placed at different points around the globe? That should make anybody curious all by itself even without Tsunami and WTC's collapsing when the spikes occur.
Oh, and of course, it's no trick to look back and find a spike AFTER a momentous event.
This argument is pointless and over-used. "Just because there appears to be a link does not mean there is a link" is certainly a valid observation, but I find it very remarkable that people almost never seem to understand that the opposite position is also just as true. This effectively invalidates the logical usefulness of this observation in any kind of debate.
Just because cold reading works, doesn't mean that all things are read cold.
It's a variation on the famous broken logic, "All cows are animals, therefore all animals are cows."
Look deeper and you will see.
-FL
As for the observations being useless. . . If something cannot be applied to a limited and pre-defined problem, does it invalidate the finding? The experiment suggests something very intresting about how reality works. Exploration and science is about far more than securing mineral rights and patents.
-FL
Ah, grasshopper, you assume that our universe is the only one
No, I assume that any number above 10^80 monkeys is abusing the meaning of "enough". And yes, that includes infinity. With inifinite universes we also get other fun stuff, such as assuming all the laws of physics have been broken in some universe (since they have only been tested to a certain degree of certainty but there are infinite universes). Also, infinite universes allows me to say that a (where by "a" I mean infinite) planet exactly like ours, including life, was created by a quantum event in an instant. Though it is incredibly unlikely, that would be the simplest theory for the orgin of life.
some theories require there be more than one universe
And some don't. I don't see any reason to suppose that for each possibility there is a different universe in which that happened. In the case of the quantum mechanics version of the many universes idea: Quantum mechanics is explained quite nicely by wave collapse. Chance explains this quite nicely without requireing both chance and extra universes. For any wavefunction, we know the probability that it will collapse to any of several possible states, and to preserve this, the many universes theory would require that several universes appear for each time a wavefunction collapses, so that it preserves the obserned probability (otherwise everything would be just as likely).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
blame out new alien overlords. Or maybe our old alien overlords, I don't fucking know.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
>>> The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph.
>> No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
> Except that statistics does show that over enough time the series will converge into equal numbers. It may take a million times, or ten million, but eventually you'll end up with almost exactly equal number of ones and zeros.
Presumably an infinite run would cross the balance point an infinite number of times, but that's not the point. Consider this subtlety:
Suppose you have a "fair" bit generator and you plan to let it run for a month. What's the expected value for the number of excess heads at the end of the month? Yes, zero. But suppose you run it for a week and notice that it now has, say, 100 excess heads. What is the expected value of excess heads between now and the end of the month?
And what is now the expected value for the number of excess heads over the course of the entire experiment? [The answer is printed up side down, below.]
Spoiler follows ===============
i 00l 5,Ll 'll34 40
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
eg: A server that can predict it's own slashdotting.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
A giant spike was recorded today by the Little Black Box.
The cause?
The collective frustration of Slashdotters at the decline of quality of their news website...
Is Red Nove pure Junk Science, or do they have any content of value?
What if our entire universe already is simulated in a computer, including us human "observers"? Isn't it then at least conceivable that there is a possibility to tap into already existing aggregated data streams somewhere within that system?
Descartes be damned, while we still can't reliably determine if the entire reality we perceive is simulated. Too bad the "Matrix"-movie sequels ruined the concept, as the general hypothesis behind them is interesting.
If our entire reality is a computer simulation, it surely isn't perfect, it can't be. I bet Goedels Theorem also applies for "outside" algorithms as well, so that "universe machine" couldn't be perfect. And if we might be some kind of "programs" inside a non-perfect system environment, we could "peek" at other "memory pages", "manipulate the stack" or whatever that would be called.
To further idealize the situation, I would conclude and call i.e. Shaolin monks "cheaters" as in "using an aimbot on a public game server". Gathering data from outside the current process environment inside our computers is called debugging at best, cheating at worst.
If information about the other "players" is stored at a different adress in the same memory page from the same process - and it could be accessed somehow - it doesn't matter how many "pixels" that "character" is away in the actual "game".
So far the hypothesis. Making actual predictions on realworld (sic) situations is where that falls apart. Because this models our reality as "created by someone", it could theoretically explain everything away. From gravity and general relativity up to the most improbable psi-experience accounts. Basically it concludes each and every question with "because God (sic) wanted our universe to be exactly like that". Which brings us nowhere in terms of science and progress. If these random number generators are enabling us to eventually test an hypothesis like that mentioned here, it could really be a breakthrough, in terms of science and society together.
Human beings have been religious since their very beginning and it would hardly surprise me if there really was something behind it. And I think it's time to bring this outside the realm of charlatans and textbooks from more than 2000 years ago. And make it usable beyond feel-good activity and "population control" or "opium for the masses".
Most people do not read the peer-reviewed scientific literature, so they remain blissfully unaware that this 'epidemic' is taking place.
The literature is now filled with papers that are paid for by special interest groups, corporations and plain old loonies and which contain not a whit of scientific integrity or merit. The popular press has not twigged to this because of widespread 'dumbing-down' - in evidence I offer Scientific American and MIT's Review of Technology.
And you are wrong about me; regardless of the support for it in the scientific community, I would still dismiss this particular foolishness as 'pseudoscientific bullshit'. I am just as unpopular in the scientific community as I am on Slashdot.
While it is difficult to choose from the wealth of references available, here is a link to a particularly egregious example of the kind of paper that constitutes this 'epidemic': Seizure Alert Dogs
If you want to find your own examples, I offer this simple formula: Search the headlines in the popular press for references to the peer-reviewed literature. The ones printed in the biggest fonts, most prominently displayed, most widely circulated and occupying the most column inches are almost invariably the best examples of what I call 'psudoscientific bullshit'.
The scientific community increasingly depends upon mindless popular support for funding, as does the news media. The result? Uncritical reportage of results designed to capture the largest cheque. I think 'epidemic' is a fair term.
Hi Everyone,
Just a few observations about time that I find quite wonderful:
First, time itself is an artifact of partitioned consciousness. It's rather like the relationship of the video raster to an image which it displays. There's a stream of pixels flowing along, and each particular pixel has a moment in which from the standpoint of the stream it defines the totality of "now." But there's a different point of view that isn't limited to a pixel stream, one that experiences the entire picture at once.
These two forms of experience aren't antithetical, they exist simultaneously (though of course the pixel-stream/ego-consciousness form isn't big enough to experience or comprehend the other one, and so would argue that the holistic form is impossible or even nonsensical).
It's the limitations of ego consciousness that have us experience time.
Once we start talking about time, we can notice that time flows both forwards and backwards, again simultaneously.
There's the direction that we call forwards, where time appears to flow from the past up to a present moment, beyond which we don't have any memory. I think of this as the "push" direction of the flow of time.
There's also the other direction, the flow of time from the future into the past. I think of this as the "pull" direction of the flow.
As in the previous example, the "pull" direction is aware of the entire stream, the entire picture, while the "push" direction starts out unaware of any of it, and gradually becomes aware of more and more as its "now" moves towards the future.
There's an old proverb that says "what you are seeking is also seeking you." It's talking about our movement through time. As the past pushes forward into its unknown to discover its future, there's also a future actively desiring to be found.
We can also relate time and the resulting notions of past and future to personal psychological concepts of ego, shadow, and Self.
Things that exist in the past are the elements that were safe enough to move into ego consciousness from the unconscious or shadow (we become ego-aware of them as they move from the future/shadow to the past/ego as we progress the now). The elements about ourselves/our lives/the universe that are still too unsettling to experience remain safely hidden in the future/shadow, on the other side of the now. (And if you don't think that knowing the future might be unsettling, consider suddenly knowing everything that would happen in your entire life - all the successes, all the failures, all the deaths of everyone you care about, the wonder and excitement of every surprise. While incarnation and ego consciousness can be a horrible cage, from the standpoint of complete connectedness, separation is the most wonderful gift in the universe. To be able to not know!) The whole stream, as a complete, circular entity, is like the Self.
So time can be seen as a way that the physical universe itself has consciousness, one that is self-similar to our own.
Of course, time and space could be the universe manifesting its own mind-body split, or it could simply be our way of experiencing the universe because that's the perception that crystallizes out when our human consciousness touches it. That ego-or-Self perception effect again!
And when all the varied wheels-within-wheels streams complete their cycles, and at every scale ego consciousness is unified with the Self, the whole game starts over. (That's the "Let there be light" or "Let there be a Big Bang" or whatever you like moment. Religion and science are just remembering the same event from two different directions.)
To connect all this to the article, if it's not already obvious, the experience that the future and past can't affect each other is merely a side effect of the point of view that they can't!
If we run our experience of the world through a perceptual mechanism that is too smal
He has his finger exactly on the sweet spot were this story falls apart.
Correlation does not imply causality. I think no more needs to be said. Move along....
Try the second one, scooter:
"As discussed above, the decay of an unstable nucleus (radionuclide) is entirely random and it is impossible to predict when a particular atom will decay. However, it is equally likely to decay at any time."
---
All your old jokes are belong to sigs.
OK everybody, just concentrate ... I sense the future ... sometime in February, 2005, slashdot will ... Jump the freakin' Shark(tm) ... oh yeah, that would be the present. Sorry.
I almost spilled my coffee when I read this (FTFA): He began by showing them a sequence of provocative cartoon drawings.
You know, this story should have been posted under the hardware section. Why? I think the big nut symbol is really appropriate for people who believe this kind of bunk.
please change me. - sig
I hope the web server was not also the machine trying to gather data.
Worked pretty well for predicting the future -- actually, I'm not sure it was ever wrong.
I'd roll a 19, find out that the party was going ot get jumped by two bugbears and an iron-deficient halfling... and it was right!
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Except that statistics does show that over enough time the series will converge into equal numbers. It may take a million times, or ten million, but eventually you'll end up with almost exactly equal number of ones and zeros.
Completely incorrect. Please cite your reasoning for this claim, the opposite is actually true. If in doubt, run some simulations to see why.
I agree completely. I neither meant to demean nor elevate the science underlying eugenics, simply to use it as an example of a popular but poorly supported scientific idea.
The perpetual recycling of the Frankenstein story is one of the things I dislike most about the popular media.
The only ocurrence of the word "chaotic" in the second article appears in the phrase "On the premise that radioactive decay is truly random (rather than merely chaotic)". That sentence only makes sense if they are not synonyms, which is indeed the case.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If you are talking about real world events, I agree with you. If you are talking about true random events, then you couldn't be more wrong.
Except in the case of the "experiment" in the article, they are ignoring the fact that most of the apples are flying upwards and that a significant number of the apples which are detaching themselves from the branches are floating there unnoticed, neither going up or down.
As one of my professors once said, and many others have alluded to in posts further up: nothing is random. The only way for the results of something to be truly random is to sample it to infinity. Since we are unable of doing that, we are always stopping our sampling at some point in time and thereby biasing the results. The bias will always show a result occuring more often than the other possible results. Well, it was something along those lines ... I believe he said it more eloquently.
And actually, this was the basis of this professor's grading scheme for the class. Never in all of his classes and his colleague's classes had he ever seen a true "bell-curve" distribution for a quiz, exam, homework, etc. The simple fact was that there always existed anomalies where 2, 3, or more "humps" existed depending on characteristics of the groups of students. Perhaps there had been an athletic meet the night before, so the group of students attending that meet represented a hump that had been shifted lower. Or perhaps the teaching assistant was friends with some of the students and the met the night before to study, so that group was shifted higher. And then you have the majority group that represented the larger hump. By trying to fit all of these individual trends under one larger trend, you artificially shift the grading scale for a certain group of students. For example, say there was one larger group and one smaller group shifted upwards from the larger group. By fitting them all under a single bell curve you artificially lower the larger group's scale to maintain the "typical" distribution. I believe he graded on a straight scale.
Assuming that the results of different trials are independent, the variance should decrease as the number of trials increases (variance is proportional to 1/n, where n is the number of trials).
The article points out that the selection of events as "major" seems to be done after looking at the RNG output ("You are selecting your data.") rather than blind.
Well, then, the article is claiming things contrary to what the GCP itself is claiming.
The Global Consciousness Project's web site does not emphasize what you say it claims. It emphasizes the data points that support the affirmative hypothesis.
Perhaps it "emphasizes" what you say. But its methodology is what I described, and not debunked by the article.
Cellular Automata can be used to generate almost perfectly random numbers (much more random than even some of the most tried-and-true methods), but that technique was not being used in the 70's, when this supposedly started.
.
My guess is that since they describe RNG's as "black boxes", they are using hardware RNG's, which use the fluctuations derived from an apparently random 'natural' process, like electric (resistor noise, by far the most common) and radioactive decay.
But I find it interesting and ironic that each of the events they have talked about predicting in many cases have associated electrical phenomenon!
They even mentioned it in the article. A billion people watching Princess Di's funeral, or 9/11 -- ok, so a billion tv sets around the world turn on, and if your RNG is plugged into the wall . . . is it going to affect it? I dunno, but if it's a resistor-based RNG . . . the OJ Simpson trial, ditto. People are gonna start tuning in before the verdict; this produces, at the very least, an ELECTRICAL EVENT that is likely detectable anywhere on the power grid.
With showing the person slides of pictures, and the random number fluctuations happening prior to the person seeing the picture . . . um . . . is there any electrical machinery plugged into the wall that takes an action to ready/display the next slide? Wouldn't that be funny, now . .
And, of course, a tsunami produces measurable electrical phenomena as well. I don't know if it produces electrical phenomena in advance, of course, and it would seem that if that was the case we would be able to use it to predict seismic events
I don't know anything about whether fluctuations in resistor/semiconductor-based RNG's can happen as a result of electrical phenomenon, but I think that the fact that the article makes no mention of attempts to screen for electrical interference, to detect correlating electrical/field events, or to isolate the RNG's in some way is a good indicator that these guys aren't trying very hard to play devil's advocate.
I'm always leery of "retro-active predictions". Let me know when it predicts something before it actually happens.
You seem to have an odd definition of the word "only" that I am not familiar with. From just one of the many articles that debunks this:
If you view the next page you see many of the posts from the previous page. It's really confusing because you dont know where it starts or ends. I don't get why it doesn't work as one would normally expect.
What does this passage mean? How, exactly, has Dr Nelson refuted that "there is always some global event that could be used to 'explain' the times when the Egg machines behaved erratically". The article seems to claim he has used "rigorous scientific techniques and powerful mathematics" to exclude the fact that the Egg reaction and the proximity to a major event are not random. However, the critics in the previous paragraph are saying major events happen each day, and if the Egg went off every day we would always have an explaination. I dont understand how Dr Nelson has answered the critics. Also, how can we know that the identified major events are actually what is driving the Egg (maybe a car crash that killed someone in a large, scattered family drove it up 4 hours before the 9/11 attacks).
And how many false negatives are there, when a large event happens, say the announcement that North Korea has the bomb or the disputed election in the Ukraine, and the Egg does not predict anything?
This sounds like the wonderful theory that bad things always happen in threes. They always do, because you count the next three bad things that happen in succession and then start over. Works everytime.
Yes indeed, just like the book in the Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, this random generator predicts the future with perfect accuracy--also, the future with exactly one thing wrong, the future with exactly two things wrong, and so forth.
It's less useful than knowing the answer to the ultimate question of life is 42 because 42 is a lot easier to remember than a RNG algorithm,
Do not agree with you. I have not seen any evidence to support what you claim. Having read the article and having known about this even before the /. posting. There are possibly plenty of times a major deviation happens and there are no major events and there are also times events happen with no major deviation.
Of course there are plenty of times a major event deviation happens and there are no blah blah blah. That's what the article is saying, and that's what my post - the one you're directly responding to - is saying that nobody denies.
But it has nothing to do with anything. They're not claiming "major deviation == major event". They're claiming "major event implies a greater than expected chance of major deviation". And again, the "debunking" article doesn't address that claim.
Until I see all the data noting any kind of event that could be seen as "major" it's appears to be a case of going back into a huge amount of data and trying to connect the dots by highlighting what you want to find and ignoring that which you don't. Every time there's a deviation they go and actively look to match it to something. Not very scientific to me.
Again, like many people here, you're assuming, and in fact you're assuming incorrectly.
They do not look for deviations and then go look for something to match it to. For exactly the reason you (and others) describe. Their website is explicit about this.
Rather, what they claim to do is:
(1) In general, not look at the data.
(2) Decide that they arbitrarily consider an event sufficiently "major".
(3) Decide upon a timeframe around that event which they arbitrarily consider to be sufficiently linked to the event.
(4) Upon such a decision, then, and only then, go back and look at the data in that timeframe, and count the number of zeroes and the number of ones generated during that timeframe.
And their claim is, that so far, they've found major deviations using this method significantly more often than is predicted by assuming that steps (2) and (3) are meaningless.
I think that this article debunks it pretty well.
Again, the article debunks the claim that you have assumed that they're making. Which is not the claim that they're making.
But when you only partially show your hand, giving people what you want to show them, it becomes sensationalistic.
In what way have they only "partially" showed their hand? Exactly what way? Before you answer, please be advised that their website is chock full of information.
Erm... 'less random'? Does this phrase ring alarm bells with anyone else too?
Either they mean 'random' in the information-theoretical sense, in which case they've clearly done a huge amount of work on various compression techniques and suchlike, or they're probably using it wrongly.
When most people use 'random', what they really mean is 'randomly-generated'. For example, here's a random number: 43. Is that really random? How could you tell??? Maybe I picked my house number, maybe I pressed keys at random, maybe that's my favourite number...
As books like The Bible Code, the work of Nostradamus, and umpteen others have shown: you can find significance and meaning in anything if you look hard enough! The knack is to find it when you don't know what results you're looking for; to make successful predictions. Without that, the whole project seems a bit 'random' to me...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Yeh, but nothing in the world is really honest. The dice you are throwing? Did anyone actually do the mass properties analysis to determine how much shallower the holes on the "six" side need to be than the holes on the "one" side? And how much less ink needs to be applied? For the dice to be perfectly symmetric in all dimensions, and for all moments of inertia to be exactly the same? And if they did do the analysis, did they do it right? And if they did do it right, was the production line able to produce it accurately out to the last (or infinite) significant digit? The problem is that nothing in the world is random, everything is biased in one way or another. The gates on that microchip to randomly select between 0 and 1 might be getting weak, I don't know. That pop can sitting on your desk ... it's not a perfect cylinder. The radius at the top is 1/100th of an inch smaller than the radius at the bottom. Etc Etc Etc
... I would have chucked it right back at his head for not applying the theory to the real world. Theory doesn't exist in the real world.
So if I had said that same thing in your professor's class and he pitched an eraser at me while quoting the theory
Has anyone examined the ACTUAL binary data produced by the eggs? Maybe it's not random. Maybe it's a message from the future. A warning. Maybe it's an MPG of the planes crashing or an MP3 of Sir Elton John's revamped Candle in the Wind. And check both Big and Little Endian. It might be from the iMac G8.
This sounds like another one of those "choose the second number in the third set of 8 numbers and square root it and you discover Hitler is still alive and going to take over the world." These things are just another part of life, patterns happen.
-delgertome
Just like the elevators in the Offices of the Hitchikers Guide. It was scared to go up 'cause it could see into the future.
Artists invent the concepts, Scientists figure out how to make it work.
Personally, the only reason I laugh at psychic phenomena is because it makes me nervous. I don't want it to exist. Yet it's pretty evident that it does, to at least some extent.
I'm glad it's being studied. I thought it was firmly in the realm of crackpots.
Article: "The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph."
badasscat: No, the laws of chance do not say any such thing. In fact, the laws of chance say exactly the opposite. If you have two choices chosen at random over a series (a 1 and a 0; or heads and tails on a coin), there is a high probability that one of the choices will be chosen a significantly higher number of times than the other. Over time, the percentage disparity will decrease to near zero, but the total numerical disparity is likely to increase.
Maestro4k: Except that statistics does show that over enough time the series will converge into equal numbers. It may take a million times, or ten million, but eventually you'll end up with almost exactly equal number of ones and zeros.
badasscat is right. Perhaps you misunderstood: If I flip a coin only once, the difference in the number of zeros and ones is tiny -- it is only a difference of 1. At ten million and one flips, I cannot possibly be any closer than that same difference. The OP was pointing out that the absolute difference gets larger even as the ratio of the number of ones to the number of zeros approaches 1.
I realize I'm adding this way late in the game, and that hardly anyone will ever read this, but I just felt the need to correct it for posterity.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
If this thing really works, then if it predicts major disaster, we could take steps to prevent it. But this would mean altering the future, and causing this device to have predicted something different, which would mean we would not have prevented the disaster. See the Catch-22?
The ancient Romans had a solution. In times of crisis, they would consult the "Sibylline Books," which told of the future and what to do about it. But they would consult them only in desperate times.
Granted, Rome fell, proving that the Books were just fluff, but if this Sibylline Device really works, we should only use it when we absolutely have to.
My poorly-stated point was: This isnt science if they don't know or more likely, carefully profess ignorance of, the very basic quirks of their inputs, all well documented for over 50 years. Occam's razor suggests one look at simpler explanations, like electromagnetic or radiative influences, not speculate about weird chrono-synclaptic infudibulums.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
Huh? Pi is not random. Calculating it will give you exactly the same sequence of numbers every time you calculate it.
If (suspendion of disbelief here) it could see anything, then of necessity you should be able to see everything. Full vector information of the future through a mere scalar output.
But we all realize that the real question is, can this tell us what will happen with Number-One-Celebrity-Of-The-Week?
"To generate a true random stream of numbers is incredibly difficult, if not impossible"
Yeah, that was my first thought as well, as computers can only general pseudo-random data.
As I searched a little on the topic, I discovered the following quote from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/RandomNumber.html, which I found interesting:
"It is impossible to produce an arbitrarily long string of random digits and prove it is random. Strangely, it is also very difficult for humans to produce a string of random digits, and computer programs can be written which, on average, actually predict some of the digits humans will write down based on previous ones."
Anyone know of such a program or the theory behind it?
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
Despite all the PhDs who get quoted in TFA, it still belongs at the supermarket checkout stand..."Nostradamus rolls binary dice!"
Bullshit
For instance, the art said:If most of the article is implying that massive angst among the earth's people is what nudges the RNG output into anomolous states then what the hell is this "prediction" crap? does it mean that a 20 or 30 arabs who are really nervous can emmit psy-waves as intense as the balance of the planets people? What loosey goosey innumerate dodo writes crap like that?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Not this tired bunch of nonsense again. Crackpots have been trying to show that PSI exists with so-called Random Number Generators for decades, this nonsense is no different. The first indicator that this is pseudoscience, and that slashdot has zero credibility for posted this nonsense - without even an attempt to verify the claims - is that the people running this experiment don't seem to be even aware of all the previous work done in this area. Without exception, when the RNG's were looked at it was determined that they *weren't random*. The first question these "scientists" should have asked themselves was if the experiment had a flaw, hell, even Einstein Einstein once pointed out in a letter to Dr. Jan Ehrenwald, who was doing similar experiments that the statistical variance in the RNG's, "suggest[ed]...a very strong indication that a non-recognized source of systematic errors may have been involved [in ESP experiments]". And in that case, the RNG was indeed flawed. It could not produce random numbers. This has happened before, and the simple explanation applied. The experiment had a fundamental flaw, the RNGs were not RNGs. They were not random.
Think people, think! This is an unbelievable unparalled claim on their part, that human thought - just *THOUGHT ONLY* can influence an RNG, and they offer no more proof than the claim that their so-called RNG's should be random, but aren't. OK, heres an idea, maybe, just maybe the simple explanation applies here - the RNG's have a flaw - they can't produce random numbers for the entire period of the experiment. If they can't at least rule that out, all the other conclusions are bogus. You can't jump to the conclusion until you know your suppositions are valid, and they haven't done that. Their entire claim rests on one simple assumption:
Their black boxes produce totally random numbers for the entire period of time the experiment occurs. They have not proved that claim, to the contrary, they have demostrated that their black boxes are not random - which begs the question: WHY? The hypostatic leap to "well, people must be using their super duper psychic powers to influence it!" or "thought waves did it" or "some magic must be happening" or "it was space aliens" or anything else you want to think up is not supported by anything. The suppositions themselves are NOT SUPPORTED - ie, that the RNGs can produce random numbers. Their conclusion is worse than a wild eyed guess, its illogical - they can't conclude anything without first proving that they can build a reliable RNG.
So, quick review, its not an RNG if it can not produce random numbers for the *entire* period of the experiment. You can buy a laptop with an RNG that will do this, and since their RNGs don't produce random numbers, the question is still outstanding. They have also not proven they even know how to build an RNG - they sure know the buzz words, but since their RNGs aren't random, its cause for alarm. Heres the thing, we KNOW why RNG's don't produce random numbers, we KNOW how to build RNG's that do - and we KNOW how hard it is to get it right, yet they don't seem to be able to do it. Its far more likely these crackpots just don't know anything about cryptography and how to produce RNGs.
Want more proof? OK, DR Roger Nelson, one the principals in this [URL:http://www.princeton.edu/~rdnelson/] and the director of the Global Conciousness Project has NO expertise in RNGs, zero, zlich, none! He has degrees in psychology only and has no experience building, let alone commenting in ANY peer reviewed journal about the quality of the single most important part of the experiment, the Random Number Generators - yet he worked on the RNGs! Repeat: he is not an expert on RNGs, he knows nothing about them, he has zero clue on this subject, hes a N00b and he helped design them. In fact, some of the REGs they use (they don't even call them RNGs) use proprietary generators, that are not open to any peer review. What bizarre is that there are commercial RNGs, that have b
It's all deja vue to me.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'll believe this more when a second, completely independent, set of these RNGs are setup and the results compared between both networks. Isn't that the scientific method?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
obviously the digits are the same every time but you missed the point. The digits in that number cannot be predicted, they are random in that they do not follow any repeating cycles (it is called a normal number). What this means is that supposedely the digits in Pi are met as often as if they were produced randomly.
You can't handle the truth.
Hrmm. is the number generator predicting the evennts, or is it CAUSING the events!??!?!
RANDOM NEUMBER GENERATOR IMPLICATED IN 9/11 ATTACKS
or
GLOBAL NETWORK OF RANDOM NUMBER GENERATORS CAUSE MASSIVE UNDER-SEA ERATHQUAKE! OVER 100,000 DEAD!!1!!
There is only one logical conclusion! All random number generators MUST BE DESTROYED!!1!!
Its a good thing my Athalon based PC system only has a PSEUDO random number generator!
Lack of bias is insufficient. There may be subtle correlations between successive bits, which would increase the probability of spikes.
>Anyone know of such a program or the theory behind it?
My wild guess is it's something like Jungian archetypes embedded deep in ever human's mind.
There's a trick where you ask a person to imagine a two digit number and then guess it correctly. I think it's 87 or something like that - everyone thinks of the same number.. Quite freaky. Perhaps you can search the Web for the exact way it works.
If the probability is 1:1,000,000, then in one million experiments there is a finite probability (1:1,000,000) that you may see the event once, and a lesser finite probability you would see it more than once.
What then is an infinite probability? Hint: go and ask your professor in statisitics.
No, it's accurate for the energy of an object at rest. The rest of the infinite series is only nonzero when the object is in motion. The next term of it is 1/2mv^2, the same as the kinetic energy formula in Newtonian mechanics, and the rest have a c in the denominator, making them usually very tiny.
It's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
A third of a million did you say?
Why... that's 9/11 times 166.667!
Get your Unix fortune now!
Forseeing the future, but not knowing what is going to happen is probably better than knowing the present, and still not knowing what is happening/
Regardless, the 'noise' that these RNGs perceive is undoubtedly somewhat affected by radio broadcasts, as they tend to bleed out into other frequencies.
I don't see what MS Windows has to do with predicting the future.
Whoa! I just thought of something. So since suddenly all /.ers began thinking about the random number generators, were there any fluctuations in the readings?
Has anyone submitted a prediction that Slashdotting the site is a "major event"?
"90% chance of big things happening today!"
activestudios web design
WTF??. Are this people for REAL??. GIVE ME A BREAK!.
I cant believe that a uni waste their time/resources with such crap!.
And more, I cant believe that some people take this seriously!!. COME ON!.
A what?? physicist? ROFL WHAT KIND of physicist is WASTING their time with S*IT LIKE THIS??.
Predict the future with a box sided like two cigarette packets???.
What this people have been smoking?. CRACK? I guess. At least.
And Dr Roger Nelson? Doctor?. Doctor in WHAT??. In cigarette packets, OF COURSE!.
They predict the 9/11 attack!. And the tsunami desvastation. AND SAY NOTHING!!.
HAHA. WHAT THE F*CK?. THey predict events that have already happend!. But they said
that was predicted BEFORE!.
AH. they predict the elections in IRAQ! TOO!!.
This just STUPID and dont deserve more analysis and I HATE TO BE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
WITH PEOPLE THAT STILL LIVING IN THE 18th century!.
in other news all of these events have already been predicted since the beginning of math. mathematicians have predicted every event to happen in the future with the number pi
What I was looking to find in this report was an example of something like "a special pattern happened on this day, but absolutely nothing globally significant occurred."
There were no examples of this.
There was the question of the eggs acting strangely about a day before the events, but this would be explained by their time shift/precognition theory. Wouldn't this be an important, if not the most important question to be asking regarding the legitimacy of the eggs' results? What if "special patterns" happened 3 times a week? Was the question left out of the article if it was asked?
Does anyone have any information on whether or not complete anomalies ever occured?
So they're compressing something like:
98 zeros (so obviously 102 ones, that doesn't need to be stored)
90 zeros
103 zeros
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
though the immediate reaction to her death would have been much stronger than the reaction to the funeral.
How long did it take you to find out about Diana's death when she died? Seconds? Minutes? Hours?
How long did it take you to find out about 9/11?
Oh definitely! I would totally agree! Right on target there. Just what I was about to say.
Read my blog: HansMast.com
Machines that can predict the future! This could be incredibly useful for people, unless you want to know what's going to happen. Just be aware that a shift in the regularity of pseudorandom number generators means SOMETHING is about to happen.. which is significant, because things aren't always happening all around us. I, for one, think they should sent out global alerts whenever the patterns deviate from the norm. For example, they could say, "QUICK! EVERYBODY STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND STAND STILL, OR RUN AWAY, OR CONTINUE WHAT YOU'RE DOING, BUT DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU."
A new era of global peace and prosperity is upon us.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You have to accept that in a "fair" device, the probability of getting 100 heads in a row equals the probability of 100 tails in a row, and that its possible for that 100 head lead to evaporate. Saying that because it was 100 heads ahead after a week suddenly the expected outcome after the remainder of the time would be 100 heads ahead isn't valid.
run by a group of scientists who respect the scientific method
What evidence are you using to back up the claim that these "scientists" respect the scientific method?
We think something is going to happen. We don't know whats going to happen. We don't know when it's going to happen. And we don't know where it's going to happen. But it is going to happen.
If something goes by such a derogatory name surely it must be easy to see through it. I think often that is not true.
...or in a series of steps:
:)
Most people who dismiss out of hand claims like the RNG stuff above(or even come up with arguments against it),
mainly recognize some style attributes, know themselves backed by some authoritative sources and proceed on that.
I agree that if "they go through the trouble of finding out for themselves" (without consulting parties like CSICOP) a lot of the literature in that sector really can make them doubt. Or believe.
But it's not because the literature uncovers some deep truth and sceptics are blind to it.
Crackpot science tends to drift towards areas where it is difficult to think well, and where people are bound to be wrongfooted. If you make a complicated construction in that area, it's not simple to counter it. One aspect, trying to make sense of a random output really aims for our achilles heel. We can make sense of anything. In one step:
Throw a few coins on the table and you can make a face out of it.
"This spike's timing is off." "No it's not! It's a premonition!"
"This spike is shortly before newyear. Nothing special happened then." "Sure there was something. A big celebration."
I haven't looked into the actual research, but the rednova article looks like a big stinker. I'm not one of those wussy die-hard-prove-it-to-me guys, but I'm diehard allright. I forego my chance to be on the forefront for this. I'll hear it if the story is still around in a year or so
At ten million and one flips, I cannot possibly be any closer than that same difference. The OP was pointing out that the absolute difference gets larger even as the ratio of the number of ones to the number of zeros approaches 1.
You all are being ridiculous. The math it takes to prove your point is quite simple, and is a lot more effective than this handwaving.
Flip Difference
HHHH 4
HHHT 2
HHTH 2
HHTT 0
HTHH 2
HTHT 0
HTTH 0
HTTT 2
THHH 2
THHT 0
THTH 0
THTT 2
TTHH 0
TTHT 2
TTTH 2
TTTT 4
The probability of any given outcome is exactly equal to any other outcome. Now, of those 16 outcomes, 2 of them lead to a disparity of "4". 8 of them lead to a disparity of "2" and 6 of them lead to a disparity of "0". Thus, if I were to take 1000 sets of 4 coin flips, I'd expect to see either heads or tails lead by 2 in 500 of them. In 125 of them, I expect to see all heads or all tails (disparity of 4) and in the remaining 375, I expect to see them even.
Thus, I expect sequences of random numbers to come out a little ahead in either heads or tails more often than I expect a sequence of random numbers to come out exactly balanced.
From http://noosphere.princeton.edu/story.html
"The main GCP prediction was similar to that for the preceding New Year, namely that there would be an accumulation of deviant EGG data during a 10 minute period around midnight. The result in this case was positive but not very impressive compared to the year before. On the other hand, a striking outcome was generated with a different analytical approach applied by Dean Radin. He predicted that the variation among the individual eggs (we had 27 running by this time) would decrease near the transition to the new year, and become very small just as everyone's focus centered on the stroke of midnight. His analysis showed a spectacular confirmation of that idea, with a highly improbable spike in the data, registering its greatest deviation just a few seconds from 12:00. The probability for this outcome was very impressive, on the order of 1 in 1000, even with an appropriate adjustment for multiple tests. As in other cases, this strong result provoked a flurry of independent analyses, and again we found that the exact definition of terms is a strong determinant of the outcome; some apparently similar approaches showed little evidence of an effect at midnight. [Emphasis added. And yet still he goes on to say...] Nevertheless, several converging analytical efforts appear to give support for the conclusion that the data around midnight going from 1999 to 2000 differ quite remarkably from the random quality they should have according to theory. In other words, the EGG data aren't random at that time, but instead show signs of having been affected by global consciousness."
In other words: "If we look at the data after the fact in whatever ways make it appear meaningful, it appears meaningful."
There is nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
-Simon
The story was about how a random number generator, which produces 0 or 1 (like a coin flip), somehow taps into the collective human conscious to predict the future. Deviations from a .5 average is said to indicative of a disturbance in 'the force' (if you will). Like I said in the title to this comment, it is not binary, it's a play on the statistics generated by this technique.
IMHO, only one person who responded to my post 'got it' for sure (the flat-lining comment). Which is exactly the message I was trying to get across.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
If a RNG outputs either a 0 or a 1, then any combination (of any length) of these has the same probability. i.e. the chance of any given run of length n is (0.5)^n regardless of how many 0's or 1's are in the run.
-- So, quoting myself isn't that bad. --me
I have to disagree. The article does a poor job at debunking, because its author was asking the wrong questions.
Take for instance the part where 9/11 was 'anticipated' - if this were indeed the case, then it's opening a whole new can of worms, by breaking usual assumptions on causality. Then a lot of bets are off about how to interpret the data. Add to this non-locality ('global consciousness' would be a macroscopically entangled state, right?) and what you have is a complete failure of consistently describing the results in terms of modern science.
As an example: the "I don't know" answers are, in spite of what the 'debunker' says, honest scientific answers. They're looking at correlations, but only on a limited subset. Is that 'data picking'? sure. Is it normal? yes - any experiment is 'data picking'. The problem here is that correlations need not be limited to 'global consciousness' - what if they also have to do with solar explosions, distant supernovas and so on? Where do you look for correlations? To keep within the given subset, one would have to look the other way around - events affecting many human beings that are correlated with spikes or not. They seem to be doing that, but the skeptics call it 'data picking'[*]. However, even in this case, interpreting the correlation that exist is purely statistical at this level and jumping at 'predicting the future'/'global consciousness' from them requires bypassing of a few basic Logic rules.
Remember, data are just that - the given. What's valid or invalid is how one interprets them.
[*] contrary to what you were saying ("Every time there's a deviation they go and actively look to match it to something.") Actually, this was one of the things the skepticreport guy took issue with. Apparently he didn't understand why they're doing that, either. That makes a big part of his 'debunking' rather toothless, unfortunately.
This experiment could not net any results at all if they were using, and indeed, if it were even possible, to derive truly random numbers from a generator which could not be influenced by any outside source. This is the founding stone upon which the whole experiment is based; that streams of events generated at different points all over the globe can all at the same time show odd behavior. Of course something must be affecting the number generators, otherwise this observation would simply not occur. The question the researchers are posing is, "What?"
I don't see any reason why should this pose such a massive problem for some people unless it happens to be butting up against an overly sensitive article of pre-established Faith in what is and is not possible. In your case, it would certainly go some distance in explaining the long and impassioned post you left.
-FL
However, _testing_ that this event is actually random requires many repeated experiments, and then you're into the world of statistics rather than probability. In that case it is (i think) always true that with a finite number of random events it will always be possible to find a statistic that _predicts_ the sequence is correlated/non-random even if it is.
You might be cautioned that there is a type of person who cries out as loudly and with such ignorance, (and with such use of all caps). They are called Religious Nuts.
-FL
This sort of thing demands an experimental approach capable of winnowing out the fancies and willingness to see patterns of the experimenters. For example, have one group of people categorising world events as "noteworthy" or not; produce another set of "random" results covering the same period; have both sets evaluated blind for correlation against the set of supposed spikes generated by the aparatus. Rinse and repeat. If there's really anything there, the actual events should correlate more closely than the arbitrary ones.
Anything less is prognostication after the manner of Nostrodamus - you'll *always* find something to "explain" a spike if you look hard enough after the event.
Grants
Ah...how do you decide that something is truly random? The only thing I can think of that has randomness quite apart from observations is mathematically defined random variables.
We have determined that, for example, particle decay is random because it appears to be true. The theories of quantum mechanics are based upon this observation. If we found a particle for which this did not appear to happen for long stretches of time, we would probably revise our theories, not assume that it was a truly random event so we couldn't use it as evidence.
My example wasn't a metaphor. It was an example of what happens if you ignore evidence of a trend.
You have to remember to use their claim "Within close temporal proximity of major world events there will be a spike in the graph that corelates with the number and strength of emotional response of the people involved," not "all spikes coincide with world events." The kicker is that they don't have a real good way to test for "emotional response of people involved."
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The claim is they've built a machine that can not only predict future events, but somehow only predicts future events of importances to humans? Like Princess Di's funeral? What about the emergence of AIDS, SARS, or bird-flu? What about the slaughter in Rwanda, or the fall of the Berlin wall? What about the train bombing in Spain?
Why is it that the window between the 'prediction' and the event is variable? To predict that 'something' is going to happen 'soon' isn't much of a prediction.
The experiments have not been able to be replicated.
If it were possible for a mind to predict the future, that would be such an evolutionary advantage that the only species left on Earth would be the psychics, and in fact the psychics would rapidly select for ever increasing psychic ability to out-second-guess their predators/prey. Are we to believe that we can predict the future, but we don't use or develop this ability?
Which nations do you trust to use nuclear weapons responsibly?
Hey, just because it is going on at a major university doesn't mean the people aren't wacked. Remember, Dr. Peter Venkman held a faculty position at NYU (or was it Columbia?).
#include #include int main (int argc, char **argv) { int i; int d,e,f; srand(time(0)); d = 0; while(1){ for(i = 0; i 100; i++){ e = rand() & 1; f = e * 2 - 1; d += f; } printf("d: %d e: %u(%d)\n", d, e, f); sleep(1); } }
Sounds like a subject for Penn and Teller's Bullshit!
Thoughts by people could influence it -- detected in the '70's! Yet somehow it hasn't been mass produced nor overturned science and our understanding of physics. Curious.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"Finite" to distinguish from zero or infinitesimal, not from infinite.
If suddenly a beam of light is moving faster or slower in constant conditions according to your time source. Also if it was really major one could measure it by far distant pulsars and the like. Or one could put an atomic clock on a spacecraft (I think cassini might have one) if it is far enough away the pulses would arrive at several minutes remove. So even if the effect was universe wide and faster then light it would still be comprable. Or something like that.
Though a dedicated practioner could probably counter all of it (the radio waves are being modified in midflight and all that.) So it is pretty hopeless.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
Err, you mean Oak Ridge Natl Lab, I think?
Non, je ne veux pas coucher avec toi ce soir.
Don't you know that the hackish word for GOD is 'RNG'?! You'd best _ for forgiveness.
[ approaching AI ]
think it's 87 or something like that - everyone thinks of the same number.. Quite freaky. Perhaps you can search the Web for the exact way it works.
Actually, why don't you just think of a two digit number... and tell us what it is...
Science, eg. Real Science, Francis Bacon Scientfic Method science, has never been proven false.
This "random number" psychic tabloid fodder, however, is total bullshit.
Believe whatever yuou want, just don't talk to me.
Oh, absolutly. However, they did discover one very much "duh" prospect. Monkeys, being living somewhat inteligent things, aren't random. They like to play with things, and they have interests, and disintrests, etc. Hence, the basic premise is flawed.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Can someone please describe how to build one of these devices? I find it quite interesting and it would be neat to perhaps contribute to the research or experiment on our own.
This is extremely freaky... I have not heard this song since childhood, but I start singing it to some co-workers not 3 days ago, and now here it is on Slashdot, a site I read constantly, in a totally unreleated article. And the article's topic involves making things happen with your mind!
...Synchronicity, man.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Aren't slashdotter techies supposed to be able to do simple arithmetic??
Parent article said a third of a million casualties is to the WTC as WTC is to a single death. Whoa: 3,000 squared was 9 million when I was in school, not 300,000!
Granted the tsunami is a much bigger deal than WTC in terms of deathcount, but spouting mathematical nonsense doesn't prove it.
This is in NOT mainstream Princeton Research ....
"PEAR" is not a department of Princeton University, it is Bob Jahn's own "research group" he has got funding for from "non-traditional" sources.
Bob Jahn is a former engineering school Dean with (IMHO) Wacko ESP ideas he has been going on about for years.
It's his priviledge of Academic Freedom to study this stuff, and he has funding for his PEAR institute from (IMHO) Wacko private Foundations with money from rich individuals who like such stuff (spiritualism, telepathy, new age, etc , etc)
As a "real" Princeton scientist, I am embarrassed by this stuff. I hate to see the prestige of this generally high-powered academic institution used by the "PEAR" people to try to give credibility to such BS.
But its a little privately-financed eccentricity of one individual, nothing to do with what our students are exposed to.
Disclaimer: this is my personal opinion: I dont want to get legal Slander/Libel threats as I understand some colleagues who criticized the PEAR operation have got in the past.
From Jahn's web page:
(begin quote)
Engineering Anomalies Research
Investigators: R.G. Jahn and B.J. Dunne
Support: Several philanthropic organizations and individuals
The interaction of human operators with sensitive information processing devices and systems is studied by combining appropriate engineering facilities and techniques with a selection of protocols and insights drawn from modern cognitive science. In this work, premium is placed on extraordinarily precise yet robust instrumentation, tight environmental and quality control, multiply redundant on-line data collection and processing, rapid accumulation of large data bases, and sensitive analytical measures to facilitate extraction of small systematic trends from high levels of background noise, while rejecting spurious artifacts. Under these rigorous conditions, certain aspects of these human/machine interactions are found to yield anomalous effects currently inexplicable on the basis of established physical concepts and statistical theory.
Over its 25-year history, the program has produced immense databases generated under highly controlled laboratory conditions, indicating the existence of small but replicable and statistically significant correlations between operator intention and the output characteristics of a variety of random digital and analogue processors. Current experiments involve several microelectronic, mechanical, fluid dynamical, acoustical, and optical devices, and a complementary program of remote perception research, from which a number of technical, psychological, and environmental correlates have been identified. Complementary analytical studies and theoretical models have been developed to facilitate the extraction of the most salient correlations from the empirical data, and to help explicate the basic phenomena in fundamental terms.
(end quote)
The only problem with this thesis is that they have 4-10 times more "spikes in the graph" than they have "world events". If I got to pick and choose the correlation between spikes and events the way they do, my next trip to Vegas would make me a billionare.
I'm not the sort of person to just dismiss things out of hand. I've seen things happen that I could not explain with my knowledge of physics and mathematics even 30 years later. The original article sounds pretty good and I would like to believe in it. It sounds pretty cool and reminds me of some of the stuff I read when I was a kid.
Unfortunately, they are suppressing their own evidence on a massive scale by ignoring all the other "spikes" they have seen. If you get a spike on average every few hours (they had several similar spikes on the days before 9/11), any moron can correlate it to any real world activity they feel like. Especially when they feel free to let it skew by +/- several hours due to prescience as they have already demonstrated.
Get back to me when they only get one spike per event, and it always has the same lead or lag time as all the other spikes. Otherwise, get in line with all the other charlatans who think they can fool Randi and collect $1M.
I think enough scientists have already seen those apples falling. Unfortunately for the people at Princeton, when the real scientists saw falling apples they also saw the rising and floating apples being ignored by the Princetonians. A real scientist spends a considerable amount of time trying to invalidate their own theory. This is hard to do when you ignore 90% of your own data set.
There's no trend in that there metaphor.
Any stream of random numbers will work. If a *special* stream is required, then it's not random...
As Millionth Monkey points out, this is not correct. If an RNG includes Von Neumann's unbiasing algorythm it will probably remove exactly the bias that produces the results in TFA
And for all tonight's Jeopardy players, the question was: 'What happens when scientists smoke too much crack before watching "Paycheck"?'.
Carry on then. You can look all you want. Take all you need to believe. There's no rush.
-FL
I'll believe it when there is an export of this project beyond some papers. If someone can make a product that I can use, or something that society can do something with, or that scientists can play with, then I'll believe it.
Philosophistry
I need to correct a bit there. The probability is actually about 0.368 that a 1:1000000 event will occur in a million trials. I plead sleeplessness and/or lazyness. I see some other watchful souls have already noted that I stepped in the bucket. Thanks,
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Do you know how many people died in the accident with Princess Diana?
My math, as a reasonable aproximation, stands.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Wake me when it does.
And Jacques Vallee applied the scientific method to UFO reports, and surprisingly, could extract actual information from them. And was roundly ingnored by both skeptics and true believers. Go figure.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is a joke, right?
It seems to be a classic example of subjective validation.
1) There's likely going to be a newsworthy event every day.
2) The "eggs" should randomly produce upward and downward slopes.
Therefore you just connect the slope to the nearest important event and wow, you've just "proved" the existence of the supernatural...
No, actually you haven't. You've just proved that you are gullible and superstitious.
The "scientists" who are working on this have ignored both the sharp swings where no important global events could be identified and the important global events that had no reasonable corresponding swings. And that is the mark of wishful thinking.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
If this doen't sound like the Bible Code, nothing does. Seek in a large blob of random crap and you shall find -- every friggin' time.
The key is not to look for things you don't want to find, like "nothing is happening today" -- cause you'd find that, too, and then you'd know it was a basketful of hooey.
I've been reading Slashdot for my science fix. But it seems to me they're choosing articles that grab my attention and waste my time, rather than articles that actually tell me something I want to know. Anyone got a better suggestion for where I can get my science fix?
I read an anecdote by one of those people who teaches the systems to easily memorize long strings of numbers or unrelated words about the one time he missed a speaking appointment. Yes, he remembered where and when it was. Unfortunately, he was relying on someone else's directions and the 15-minute trip became an hour-long one. Of course, the local newspapers had a ball with the incident...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Doh! Yes, "Ridge" -- I knew the quote but was only 95% sure of the origin, so I did a search, and copy/pasted the whole thing, including the attribution, including the pyto.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573 920614
When critically studied, paranormal phenomena magically disappear...
Tag lost or not installed.
Read the GCP page!
'Random Sources' Link
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
These are quantum event number generators, totally unpredictable.
These results are truly spectacular and deserve to be scrutinised more closely. Nelson's team are very retiscent and themselves are playing down the results which are truly mindboggling. They are doing the right thing, not sensationalising it and causing a stink with naysayers who will not be able to accept these results and what they could mean.
The 'skeptical' link posted above remember does not critise Nelson's GCP team itself, just a researcher who seems to have step ahead in his enthusiasm of it and allegedly his own hedging of data selection. It also supports the evidence that the deviations start appearing a little time *before* the actual event. The fact that this researcher couldnt answer the skeptic as to what was causing the deviations before the event does not mean the results are invalid, they just require more research.
It seems to me that in science ppl tend to be very conservative for the sake of their own careers, despite science requiring painstaking rigour and reconfirmation of results. So when something as far fetched as these results suggest, many scientists seem to refuse to keep an open mind perhaps at the detriment of new research.
I've been following this research at princeton since Prof Robert Jahn showed that there was a 1 in 5000 chance that ppl were able to influence random events mentally. The statistical and mathematical analysis is thorough and hard to refute, both in Jahns work and here.
What *is* causing these effects and the effects in these results is going to be interesting and I would put money down that it isnt just hedging of data by deranged scientists at princeton.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Er wait you mean those aren't magic eye things?
And what's with those two gray lines I'm sure they're meaningless.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Similarly and extending from that, there is no law of anything that says that if you have a long series of 1's that it's more likely that your next number will be a 0. The "law of averages" is commonly cited here but there's really no such law.
In fact, the opposite is more likely the case. If you have a long stream of 1's, that in and of itself may be an indication that your "random" number generator is not really random at all, and is actually predisposed to generating 1's, thus increasing the probability of the next digit being a 1.
This is simply an effect of "random" number generators being real-world devices, and not what one could mathematically describe as "fair." You can bet that if someone rolls a die twenty times in a row and it always comes up 4, I'm going to put my money on the next roll coming out 4 as well.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
I find it funny that all of their sources use electronic devices to generate random numbers. In regards to what they are doing with skin resistence and brain waves, i'd like to see the same experiment repeated with falling water drops or dice rolls, as opposed to electronic analog uncertainties.
How exactly can you say the machines predict anything if the seed for the random number generator is chosen before you start it? It's impossible for them to in any way be affected by world events or people being in the room, because had these things not happened, they would still have produced the same sequence of results because they are deterministic.
In fact, the results will repeat every X years because every deterministic random number generator has a period. Does this mean that world events happen in exact cycles?
I think the real problem is this: every day, dozens of "meaningful" events happen. That's what news copanies live on in case you haven't noticed. If on that day your random number generator had a tiny bit more 1's than 0's, you look for an explanation and choose one of those events. If not, you dismiss it. Same thing with trials with people - it's very easy to focus only on those results where the person "affected" the numbers, and you'll be saying that on "some" trials people can affect the numbers, without noticing the obvious fact that this is exactly 50% of trials or whatever as predicted by probability.
If they're so sure of this, just pick any level of statistical deviance they think is significant enough to be an example of the universal consciousness flaring up, and syndicate it to an RSS feed saying "Fair warning to world: somebody, somewhere, is going to get Six Sigma screwed in an indefinite period of time from now". Granted, it wouldn't do much about the possibility of 20-20 hindsights to match the prediction, but at least it wouldn't be correctly post-dicting, which is trivial.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Ever consider the possibility that the epidemic is because the eugenicists were right?
It's the Force! The EGGs are sensing the disturbances in the Force.
Cool, maybe I can become a Jedi knight, after all.
main(char O){O++&&(((O-291)*O+27788)*O-868020?1:putchar(O++
This seems like a Chaos Theory to me. Or is it Entropy... Or Heisenberg's theory...
Or perhaps it's He who can't be mentioned for fear of being called a Troll...
I think I remember an Asimov short story with the same idea.
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
Dear Slashdot Reader:
Welcome to my world.
Sincerely yours,
Carl Jung
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Well, that's not fair. If they claimed to UNDERSTAND the phenomenon, then your demands would be fair. I think they've been clear on saying merely, "The phenomenon indicate SOMETHING is going on. There's a correllation." Perhaps some of the more exuberant are claiming causality. As an illustration, THEY are saying "If you go outside and lie down on the grass without cover for six hours, and there aren't any clouds, you're going to be sunburned.", and therefore YOU are demanding, "I must be able to construct my own sun and lawn so that I can lie down for six hours whenever, wherever I want to, and demonstrate that I get sunburned, or I'm not going to listen to you anymore."
Well, go ahead. Make your own sun and lawn. Get back to us when you're done. (No cheating on the "sun" part, I'll give you a tiny little hint, it's gonna take you awhile, cause it's gonna be REALLY REALLY BIG! AND REALLY REALLY FAR AWAY.)
Now, once these people (bozos?) claim to understand WHY their experiments are indicating that light behaves as a wave AND as a particle, or that the continents seem to be doing some kind of drifting apart from each other; once they explain WHY, then you can laugh their explanations out of town - or prove em wrong! Until then, none of this is science, merely observation.
Detailed article criticizing the "research." Has graphs and all.
http://www.skepdic.com/refuge/bunk23.html
Finally, someone who Gets It(TM).