You are sat down at a terminal that prints out a "1" or a "0" at regular intervals and told that if you can correctly predict what will be printed next you will get a dollar, but if you predict incorrectly you will lose a dollar.
What strategy do you employ to maximize your monetary reward?
Wait until I get 1 correct answer then stop.
Sounds like a boring job with little possibility to actually earn money.
You're leaving a potentially infinite amount of money on the table so F-
>prints out a "1" or a "0"
At random?
Do the "1"s and "0"s appear at random? Or, at least, with no obvious pattern.
Are there equal numbers of "1"s and "0"s?
It both answers are "yes", there is no winning strategy.
This sounds like a re-tread of a recent post on Veeky Forums which claimed a method of making money by opting to bet (or not bet) based on an expectation of "runs".
IT DOESN'T WORK!
Stop bothering us.
Or go to Vegas and come back with a fortune so you can laugh at us doubting brainlets.
>"I predict a 1 or a 0 will be printed"
Assuming that you have infinite time/can witness an infinte amount of intervals, I'd just use the theories behind random walks, realise that it's a 1-dimensional process and that the diffusion happens rather fast; just set a cut-off whereever you like, it will (with a chance of kind-of 1) land on that spot some time.
You are not told. All you can assume is that it is independent of your guessing so that you know it's not just going to output the opposite of whatever you say.
you're playing a fair zero sum game against an opponent with infinite money
if you go up at any point it's just random luck and you're almost surely going to go bankrupt anyways
Monitor a large set of itterations. If the ratio of zeros to ones is close to 1 you assume it's random and stop playing. Coin flips have no winning strategy.
>it's just random luck
Not if you discover a consistent pattern that you can exploit.
01010101010101010...
The ratio of zeros to ones is exactly 1 and yet it's not random.
You are a fool and I have a dollar. With proper investment, I can turn that dollar into millions or dollars or more. Investing has a much better track record of success than your hypothetical thought exercise.
lame
randomness doesn't exist on computers, if you're knowledgeable enough you should be able to figure out which value is most likely to appear next
most people wouldn't have a clue how to do it including me, but if there's one thing you know for sure is that it's never going to be random
Hell, apparently it's not even that hard
www-users.math.umn.edu
>yet it's not random
we don't know that
Good cryptographic PRNGs exist that are indistinguishable from random noise, and it's completely possible to generate true random numbers on a computer as well with the right hardware.
This is just the coin flip thread in disguise please delet
there's no such thing as "true random". it has to be calculated by an algorithm that uses some basic arithmetic to operate.
Times between radioactive decays in a sample
you'd need the sample size and half life. How is that random?
I have exactly 1g of U-238. Will the time between the 1st and 2nd decays I measure be longer or shorter than the time between the 2nd and 3d?
smash the 0 button
i don't understand what you mean by first decay. do you mean the first half life decay or the first atom decaying?
Why are you on Veeky Forums if you haven't even take Chem 101.
The time between the 1st and 2nd atom decaying vs the time between the 2nd and 3rd.
Not sure how you got to that conclusion...
No way of telling. Individual decays are random. One doesn't effect the next.
Statistics still apply though. You count 1000 decays in 1000 seconds. So the average interval between decays is 1 second.
An atom decays and you start your stopwatch. The 2nd decay doesn't occur until 30 seconds have gone by.
You can be PRETTY sure the interval between the 2nd and the 3rd will be less than 30 seconds.
There are easier ways than counting decays. Simply amplifying thermal noise in a circuit does the trick.
No, but you can calculate the probability that the output is random
*gets shot
Strategy 1:
Since I have no choice but to bet, I simply wite a script that bets on '1' each time, records all of the results and analyzes them for patterns, and adjusts the betting if it detects a pattern. While that's going on, I play hunt the wumpus on another terminal.
Strategy 2:
I have better things to do so I put my push the monitor off the table, kick any ass necessary, and go do something else.
>I simply wite a script that bets on '1' each time, records all of the results and analyzes them for patterns
Better yet why not simply write a script that correctly guesses each time? Genius!
Kek, works on crypto
