The strings are equally likely if they're being purely randomly selected, but not if they're being selected by people with a poor understanding of random. In the latter case, people are more likely to select HTHTHT.

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ShinyLeftPad a day ago | parent [-]

I wonder what thought process led you to believe that even though the strings are equally likely and random, people who don't choose the one you think is more random have somehow inferior understanding of randomness

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svnt a day ago | parent [-]

The issue the anecdote is reflecting is that across the data of 50 naive made-up coin tosses there are too many alternating sequences and probably zero HHHHHH.

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ShinyLeftPad 21 hours ago | parent [-]

and it's different from 50 randomly selected true coin tosses because you think it's impossible for all of them to alternate?

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svnt 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I understand your point, but the context is that repeatedly, experiments have shown that humans inject too much pattern to be good rngs. It turns out that is visible with training after the fact.

Yes, it is possible that any two 50-sequence patterns are actual rng. But some of them are much more likely, and we can tell.

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ShinyLeftPad 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> some of them are much more likely, and we can tell

Yeah if you define randomness as subjective "stuff humans can't predict" then sure...

	▲	dwattttt 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not sure what your point is. A collection of samples were taken from humans, and they did not form a uniform distribution. Samples from an unbiased RNG are much closer to uniform. Are you saying we should ignore the distribution we observe from humans and predict them as uniform anyway?