Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

'Perceived as random' seems like a pretty junk measure of other humans' efforts at producing randomness. Garbage in, garbage out. Surely analysing this tells you absolutely nothing about anything?

I would understand if the actual measurement is not perceptual but mechanised, i.e. "how small can we compress this stream of random choices using our best known compression methods" or something. (But then a stream of 10 symbols is surely not enough to show you the humans.)



They link to a comprehensive description of the randomness score at the bottom of the page: https://www.complexitycalculator.com/HowItWorks.html

It gets pretty theoretical, but basically it's estimating the Kolmogorov complexity by looking at the size of the Turing machine required to generate a particular string, rather than Shannon entropy or implementations of common compression techniques.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: