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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"."
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
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.)
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))"
For more information on REGs, here's a link to Dr. Nelson's website: http://www.princeton.edu/~rdnelson/
Quite a few, according to this interesting, skeptical report