Have you ever wondered about how random humans are? Well I have and even turned this thought into a hobby research project. (It is not finished yet). This blog post is about human randomness, and how not random we humans really are.

Most people believe that we are terrible at randomness and that instead of generating a random pattern we just evenly spread out the pattern, or that computers are truly random (Spoiler: they are not). However, these beliefs are not fully wrong, they are also not fully right. Humans can approach randomness, but cannot achieve it, and computers don’t generate actual randomness, instead they generate Pseudorandomness, basically instead of generating true chaos they have complex algorithms that turn an unpredictable input (Like CPU temp, star positions etc.) into seemingly random output, this blog post however is not about computers, it’s about humans so lets dive into how we humans do this.

Luckily I’m not the only person instrested in this subject, today we will be looking at this paper written by Paul A Warren, and this article from Wikipedia about Gambler’s fallacy.

Humans do not have infinite cognitive capacity, for randomness this means we do not notice the entirety of it just small chunks, we are limited by memory and attention, this is called the sliding window concept, we only observe a finite stream of outcomes, our attention only covers the current event plus a few previous ones.

What may appear as bias could instead reflect how randomness is actually experienced given human cognitive constraints.

The 2 experiments the paper write about lead to these key findings:

• We underrepresent runs and over alternate, this is the pattern that makes our patterns look less like actual randomness.
• Randomness measured by how we experience it is actually pretty close to truly random.
• We surprisingly don’t suck at randomness of course given our cognitive limits (memory and attention)

There are however more things we perceive wrong about randomness, one of those is Gambler’s fallacy, basically when something has happened less often then expected us humans think the chance of it happening in the future is bigger (or vise versa), this is however wrong because chances do not change based off previous outcomes.

Why does this all matter? Random isn’t just is psychological studies from universities, randomness is everywhere in our everyday life so how we interpret it matters for our view on everyday things. Randomness is present in software but also in daily decision-making.

Knowing how humans view randomness could unlock gains in UX and how systems are designed around our view on randomness making everything feel more natural. A different view on randomness would change the way we play games, interact with tech and even how we design tech.

We are prone to see order even where none exists.

My hobby project is also a fun experiment to see what patterns humans have in making random patterns, it is called HumanEntropy and you can be a part of it by making a few of your best random patterns, even just one would help dramatically. The end goal of the project is to collect enough patterns to train a ML model that can catch the difference between human made randomness and computer generated randomness.

We are not truly random, however if that is a bad thing is for you to decide.

That’s all, thanks for reading!