Seeing through Randomness

A thought experiment

(Disclaimer: We could repeat this experiment with a statistically significant audience. Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources to do that. So, dear reader, take this, not as a “scientific experiment” but as a “thought experiment”).

Setup

This animated gif (Box World 1) consists of a grid of red and white boxes. A box could be red or white with an equal (50%) random probability. So any patterns you see are entirely random.

Box World 1

I generated a very similar grid (Box World 2). The generation method is identical to Box World 1, except for five boxes.

Box World 2

Four boxes (in shape of a cross) were white all the time. While the box in their centre changed colours at a constant frequency.

Box Word 2 — with constant boxes in Blue

Experiment 1

I asked a group of friends, “Each of the box worlds is either random or NOT random. Which of the following is true?”

• Both are random
• Only one is random
• Only two is random
• Neither is random

All claimed that both were Random.

Experiment 2

I then revealed that Box World 2 was not random. But didn’t show why. Instead, I encouraged my friends to explain why it was not Random.

Again no one was able to spot the cross. Instead, they came up with various theories. I noticed two patterns in the theories:

1. The assumption that intervals of time that were different were the same. And hence, that boxes changed colour with constant frequency, when they didn’t.
2. Mistaking the colour of boxes.

The second pattern was a simple error. The first pattern was more interesting. It seemed that “time” was a bi-product of the pattern. Just as the pattern could be a bi-product of time.

Conclusions

Based on my statistically insignificant thought experiment, I came to the following conclusions.

1. Humans are bad at “seeing through” randomness.
2. Humans see patterns where none exists.
3. Humans don’t have an absolute sense of time. Instead, time infers from changing patterns.