The Human Mind is a Bayes Logic Machine

lexxyz writes "Apparently the human mind can predict the distribution type for a given sample of results. A study found in The Economist has shown that a group of minds working on single pieces of data, can together generate the statistical model used to represent a given sample. Note that it takes a group of people to be able to accurately predict the behaviour of something, not a single individual"

Comments

Cumulative video game response

[BobGregg]

Back in 1995, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, a researcher did a project in the planetarium at the Carnegie science museum. He had programmed a "joystick" to receive reflections from a set of reflective paddles held by the people in the audience. Each paddle had two different sides (red and green); depending on which side you held up, a different signal got sent back to the main processor (positive or negative, respectively). The overall "direction" taken by the game was determined by the sum of the responses - so if everyone held up "red", it as a 100% positive; but if everyone held up "green", it was 100% negative; and so on, with straight linear interpretation.

The first game was Pong. Up and down were controlled directly, if cumulatively, by the audience. You would think that control would be spotty, and that controls would overshoot. Instead, the audience was INCREDIBLY accurate in its overall response; even when the game got very fast, the audience played very, very well against the computer.

There were several games presented, but the last was a flight simulator, flying a plane through a set of rings. The left half of the audience controlled up and down; the right half controlled left and right. Again, you would think this would be nearly impossible to control - but the audience never missed a single ring, even when the game got fast.

Individually, it's doubtful that many members of the audience could have played any of the games as well as we saw the group play cumulatively. It was a clear and very effective demonstration that there was some sort of statistical model at play in the interplay of all those minds.

Re:Cumulative video game response

[stonecypher]

Occam's razor suggests that there was in fact no interplay of minds, but rather that the likelihood that any given person was off by +X was equivalent to that another person was off by -X. The experiment measures only the average of the player's skill; there is no mechanism interconnecting minds, as the people do not have any direct observation of one another's states, nor in fact any observation of their own.

If there was a private monitor on which they saw both the average and *just* their own path, then you'd start getting very, very different results.