Timeline for What is a random number? (poll experiment) [closed]
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
26 events
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:58 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://mathoverflow.net/ with https://mathoverflow.net/
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| Jan 6, 2013 at 9:34 | vote | accept | Richard | ||
| Jan 2, 2013 at 14:59 | history | closed |
Qiaochu Yuan Felipe Voloch Chris Godsil GH from MO user9198 |
off topic | |
| Jan 2, 2013 at 8:09 | history | edited | Richard | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 776 characters in body
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| Jan 2, 2013 at 7:14 | comment | added | JRN | You might also want to look at this question: stats.stackexchange.com/questions/25464/… | |
| Jan 2, 2013 at 1:52 | answer | added | JSE | timeline score: 14 | |
| Jan 2, 2013 at 0:24 | comment | added | Yuichiro Fujiwara | The discussion Joel gave a link got an accepted answer, which links to an article in the Journal of Applied Statistics tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02664760120074960 To my totally untrained layman's eye, the abstract seems to suggest the article might lead to or help to find some sort of answer to TB's original question. | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 23:35 | comment | added | JRN | I think this question is better asked at the Cognitive Sciences StackExchange. In particular, you might want to look at this question where the tendency of humans to choose round numbers is discussed. | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 23:08 | answer | added | Yuichiro Fujiwara | timeline score: 6 | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 20:00 | comment | added | Andreas Blass | A related (and therefore probably off-topic) conjecture: If you ask a lot of people to name a random number between 1 and 100, a large majority of the answers will be odd. | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 19:58 | comment | added | M P | psycnet.apa.org/… | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 19:53 | history | reopened |
Alexander Chervov Suvrit Richard Tim Dokchitser user9072 |
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| Jan 1, 2013 at 19:17 | comment | added | user9072 | Meta thread at tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/1508 [extra sign up is necessary, MO login will not work, but simple and instant, depsite the wording 'apply for membership'] | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 19:02 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | @Chervov, the actual question is "My question of course concerns adults, and results obtained via a real poll like the one suggested above: does anyone know, is anything written on this subject?" Now, it may be that someone here does know, and can point to literature, but that question is not asking for a mathematical model, and it isn't right for MO. FWIW: if someone asked me for a number, I'd assume it was leading up to something like a casting-out-nines trick, and I'd be better off saying something like 17, so that I wouldn't have an inordinate amount of mental arithmetic to perform. | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 18:54 | comment | added | Alexander Chervov | Let us make an experiment :):) I asked 2 people and got 7,9 , let me add my own 23 (but it might be skewed:) | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 18:47 | comment | added | Alexander Chervov | @Goldstern, quid you know any model of reality does not describe reality on 100%, at best model capture key features. I agree with quid's arguments, but it might be effect of "second order", so it might be something like a uniform between 1-100 and later normal tail. At least do you agree with normal tail ? | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 18:35 | comment | added | user9072 | @Alexander Chervov: I highly doubt it is like you suggest. For example, I'd speculate a lot more people should answer a million or a billion than an 'arbitrary' four-digit number. Generalising what I said above, I think it will be quite culture and language dependent too. For instance, I'd speculate that in India one hundred thousand should be more popular than at many other places since I believe there is a short and common word for it (a lakh). Or, in English, saying 67 and 97 is about the same effort, yet, in French the one is soixante-sept the other quatre-vingt-dix-sept. | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 18:30 | comment | added | Goldstern | Which process? It seems clear to me that the distribution you would get will mainly be skewed towards small numbers, plus numbers that have cultural or historical significance, such as 7, 12, 2013, 911, 1789, 1776, $6*10^{23}$, 5280, etc. | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 18:17 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | Yes, but requests to solve small systems of linear equations are also examples of mathematics asked by students of mathematics, and they are also not appropriate for MathVerflow. Perhaps your question is appropriate for a different forum. Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2013.01.01 | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 18:13 | comment | added | Alexander Chervov | @Goldstern, Trimble I would think that one should propose a relevant mathematical model to describe the process and derive the mathematically conclusions from the model, which can be tested in experimentally - so it seems to me it is quite a reasonable applied math question. I would think that the answer can be: uniform on some small interval and have tail which is normal distribution... | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 17:06 | history | closed |
Steven Landsburg Todd Trimble Federico Poloni Goldstern Lee Mosher |
off topic | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 17:05 | comment | added | Goldstern | Interesting question, but I don't see any mathematical content. Voting to close. | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 17:05 | history | edited | Goldstern |
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| Jan 1, 2013 at 16:53 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | This is not a mathematical question; it's purely empirical. I suppose some statisticians familiar with some such experiment might be able to answer, but in my opinion the question doesn't belong on MO. | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 16:29 | comment | added | user9072 | Interesting question, +1. Not really number theory, in my opinion, and also I doubt the measure is interesting (in a mathematical sense), but still now that you brought it up I'd be interested if this was done and what the result would be. (I'd guess it would also depend on cultural context, some numbers have a certain meaning in some cultures while being just-some-number in others.) I once heard, but could now not find it, of a study which 'random picks' people tend to make on some grid of numbers for a lottery and how it depends on the form of the grid. | |
| Jan 1, 2013 at 16:09 | history | asked | Richard | CC BY-SA 3.0 |