I read this article today in a magazine, and it made me think of CC and the dice complainers - Unfortunatly I haven't found a link to the whole article, rather I have just re-typed half of it.
For anyone who has complained about the dice not being random, please read this:
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Here's a party trick. Get two friends. One will flip a coin 30 times and write down the sequence of heads and tails. The other will imagine flipping a coin 30 times and also write the sequence of results. They do this in secret, so you don't know who has flipped the real coin and who has flipped the imaginary one. The "wow" moment comes when you're presented with the two lists of heads and tails and it's usually instantly obvious which is which.
"So What?" you may say. Well, this simple trick touches on some deep and bizarre mathematical ideas with great relevance to the real world. The underlying message is that humans find the concept of randomness very hard to understand (emphasis added), and this can get us into big trouble. Randomness fools us all - sometimes in entertaining ways, but sometimes with devastating consequences.
Back to the party trick. We have two lists of heads and tails: one from the real coin and one from the imaginary coin. The first list is properly random. The second list is a human attempting to be random. You can tell the difference because humans are very, very bad at faking randomness. We just can't do it.
There are different ways to tell the fake and real randomness apart, but the most obvious is to look for runs of straight heads, or straight tails. If one of the lists has a run of five heads or tails in a row, you can be pretty sure that's the real coin. In a list of 30 coin-flips you're reasonably likely to get a run of five.
When someone is imagining coin-flips, however, they almost never imagine a run of five-straight heads of tails. This is because after two or three heads our brains tend to think, "OK, time for a tails now." Our brains are implementing an order, a "coin memory", whereas in fact true randomness has no memory or what came before. Randomness creates counter-intuitively large clusters, such as a run of five heads in 30 flips of a coin, which leads to unexpected results.
As humans, when we come across random clusters we naturally superimpose a pattern. We instinctively project an order on the chaos. It's a part of our psychological make-up. For example, when the iPod first came out and people started to use the shuffle feature, which plays songs in a random order, many people complained that it didn't work. They said that too often songs from the same album, or the same artist, came up one after another. Yet that's what randomness does - it creates counter-intuitively dense clusters. In response to complaints from users, Apple CEO Stever Jobs changed the programming behind the feature: "We're making it [the shuffle] less random to make it feel more random." In other words, each new song now has to be significantly different from what came before, so as to conform to our expectation or randomness. Which isn't really random at all......
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The article then goes on to talk about gambling and poker machine addicts
