Results for: Pick a number from 1 to 10

http://nfrom1to10.appspot.com/results/

by solipsist • 15 years ago

148 67 15 years ago

nfrom1to10.appspot.com

shib71• 15 years ago

There was something about "for SCIENCE!" that was irresistible.

alecperkins7• 15 years ago

That bit of "flair" was added almost on a whim. I'm glad I did add it. I think that helped the experiment get the attention it did, especially when it got onto Reddit. It's funny how a simple factor can (probably) have such a big impact.

Also, the unintentional "mystery" of not including any information about the who or why on the site itself may have helped. I noticed many comments on HN and Reddit that speculated about each, which no doubt increased the activity profile. A little bit of personality goes a long way.

kipwork• 15 years ago

I think that the reason that 7 is so high is because it is commonly believed that 3 will is the first one you think of. As a result people choose to pick something higher, hence 4 and 7 being the top two.

lucasbmccoy• 15 years ago

I didn't think that much. I just chose 7 because I wanted to choose I high number, but anything higher then 7 would have been to high.

archangel_one• 15 years ago

I thought it was commonly believed that 7 is the most often picked - I've seen a "magic" trick based around that before.

Sort of looks to me like people avoid the extremes and also 5 (possibly because it's "right in the middle" and so perceived as "less random"?).

metachris• 15 years ago

I was talking with a friend when I visited the website, and just completely unconsciously entered any number. It was 7. After submitting I wondered why I did that without even thinking about it.

lubos• 15 years ago

my favorite number is 4 but I entered 7 because I wanted something higher and this was the highest prime number within that range :)

travisglines2• 15 years ago

It seems like publicizing some preliminary results of the study before the study is complete would put the legitimacy of the final results very much so at risk.

constructive criticism ... for science

impendia• 15 years ago

Yes, but so would (presumably extreme) sample bias.

alecperkins7• 15 years ago

After 80k votes, it seemed prudent to give those asking "so what?" a response.

travisglines2• 15 years ago

If (as I'm sure you do) you have the times along with the votes it would be cool to see if there was actually a bias when comparing the before response and after response datasets.

spravin• 15 years ago

The positioning of the dropdown clearly has a lot of influence on the results. People are horrible random number generators! In this case, people are unlikely to choose the ends (1/9) or the center (5) leading to a bimodal distribution with two modes at 4 and 7.

risotto• 15 years ago

In thinking back, that's exactly why I picked 4.

I just clicked whatever was closest because I wasn't even thinking about the exercise.

citricsquid• 15 years ago

The number picker was random, some people got a drop down, some got a list of numbers, some got a slider etc etc etc

kmiyer• 15 years ago

Note however that different types of input systems were used. Refreshes show the following different types:

  * A slider that need to be dragged to choose a value.
  * A list of numbers shown with highlighting on hover.
  * An input cursor that on hover changes to a list of numbers (within a curved border this time).
  * A text field (enclosed in a circular border), allowing manual input.

I'm quite interested in how results varied depending upon input type (possibly more interesting than seeing how they vary by referrer).

nixy• 15 years ago

Well, why don't you have a look? :) http://nfrom1to10.appspot.com/results/

bradly• 15 years ago

Was this only posted to HN? If it was posted on other sites it would neat to check the numbers against refers to see if HN is better at picking random numbers than, say, Reddit.

djahng3• 15 years ago

How do you be "better at picking random numbers"?

oniTony• 15 years ago

Even distribution, instead of bell-curves around popular/bias numbers.

alecperkins7• 15 years ago

It ended up getting posted to Reddit, and has been making the rounds elsewhere. (Over 100,000 uniques, holy cow!)

Unfortunately, the referrer wasn't tracked. I wasn't expecting to get enough hits for it to matter. The expectation was for maybe 100 over a week. IP addresses are tracked, so I'll eventually do a location breakdown.

Sukotto• 15 years ago

Assuming you don't delete them, why not use your webserver logs to link datestamp+IP address to referrer-url?

apinter• 15 years ago

I solved this problem by using software. Using your current brain state is a terrible seed for randomness.

kahawe• 15 years ago

Strangely enough, I got asked to pick a number between 1 and 10 a few days ago in an Irish pub in Germany. Looks like this was a LOT more popular than expected!

For the record, I picked 9 - much to the dismay of the person asking me.

orijing• 15 years ago

The problem is that it didn't ask us to choose the numbers uniformly. Perhaps I picked from a Gaussian distribution with mean 5 and a strict cut-off at 1 and 10.

I don't think anything can be concluded unless it asked for "choose uniformly at random among the 10 numbers," if we want results robust against question biasing.

Eliezer• 15 years ago

"Choose randomly" is generally understood to mean "choose randomly from a probability distribution containing as much entropy as possible given the problem." I mean, I could choose from the probability distribution {0.001, 0.001, 0.998} but it's commonly understood that this isn't what's meant by the word "random".

PS: I chose 2. Eat that, seveners!

adleberg• 15 years ago

Is it wise to publish updated results while the data is still being gathered? Random selection should be blind and independent and its quite possible people may change their vote to favor an 'unpopular' number or vice versa.

burke2• 15 years ago

You didn't count my 11 :(

AndyKelley2• 15 years ago

Did you actually use firebug and submit an 11 to the server? That would be pretty funny.

burke2• 15 years ago

Yep, sure did.

RossM• 15 years ago

Nor my 0 (type a ten, press left then backspace the one).

vidyesh• 15 years ago

Seems like people are so number centric and go for the universal lucky number. Not sure why. How did this help? Were you able to do any behavior analysis based on this small experiment?

I would suggest, go on a weekly result and keep tabs on result variation.

Try posting it on various/diverse communities. This might help to understand alot about visitor behavior on various websites as you can track referring websites too.

If possible graph the picks depending upon the referring websites. Or even a graph based on region, tracking via IP should be easy.

For those who missed the Parent post, check here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2375149

alecperkins7• 15 years ago

I just updated the results page with a breakdown per-interface. There are more metrics involved, but it'll be a little while before those get pulled together. (The volume of data was unexpected, to say the least, so there weren't any stats helpers in place prior to "launch".)

As for "revealing" the answers ahead of time, the whole question of "Pick a number from 1 to 10" and the common result being 7 is well known (ish), so I'm not too worried. Plus, the results aren't visible until you choose. PLUS, there were over 80k votes before that first graph was available, and over 140k by the time I put the per-interface breakdown up.

Hopefully, the volume will outweigh the people who try to manipulate it. (There's also IP tracking, which will eventually be used to help filter out anomalies, in addition to geolocating.)

I know, it's not exactly precise science, but it's a fun experiment that was simple and kept the friction to a minimum. I'm not exactly trying to write a paper. :)

Thanks to everyone who voted and spread the word, especially jedberg who posted it to Reddit.

malandrew• 15 years ago

can you do this again but with an arbitrary range. I'm curious what happens when you don't have the lucky number effect (i.e. 7)

AndyKelley2• 15 years ago

I picked 9. I feel good about doing my part to even out the distribution I predicted :)

ot2• 15 years ago

Can you do it again for 1 to 100? I'd like to improve my success probability for this http://xkcd.com/628/

vladd2• 15 years ago

Just make her pick a number between 1 and 10, you'll have at least 10 times more success probability.

StavrosK• 15 years ago

And it will be 10 times less impressive.

ComSubVie• 15 years ago

I guess 42 will be a spike in the results - but it would be interesting to verify ;)

ot2• 15 years ago

Are you implying than the average HNer or Redditer has a different bias wrt the average girl?

albertzeyer2• 15 years ago

43 is actually not bad. I would think that most people would pick something somewhere in the middle. A somewhat similar distribution as with the 1-10 results. Odd numbers more often than even numbers. Prime numbers even more often.

ZoFreX• 15 years ago

Stipulate that both digits must be distinct and odd, then guess 37.

jaredmck• 15 years ago

or distinct and even, then guess 68 (think this was an old david blaine trick if i recally correctly)

klochner• 15 years ago

I picked 3 because it's in the easiest number for me to strike (text box version).

My mouse is typically in the middle of the screen, closest to the higher-scoring numbers in the graphical version.

I'd like to see the results from the same test where you have to type the number as a word for the textbox (e.g., three), and where the numbers aren't laid out in the same numerical order for each user in the graphical version.

nazgulnarsil• 15 years ago

contrarian pride for 1 or 10.

Flam• 15 years ago

Glorious #2 Master Race.

DaniFong• 15 years ago

I thought people would think 10 was the least random number, so I picked it, :-)

I won! Yay.

davidk0101• 15 years ago

I don't get it. How is the selector relevant to what people choose? You might as well have put a different colored rabbit somewhere on the page and measured responses that way.

albertzeyer2• 15 years ago

Yay, I tried to guess and pick the number which I thought would probably be picked the least amount of people.

10 was a good guess.

adolgert• 15 years ago

Science has error bars.

alecperkins7• 15 years ago

Science takes time ;)

philh• 15 years ago

The results for 'select' seem strange. That's the only place where random specified/not makes much difference. It also indicates that a lot more people picked numbers under 'select/specified' than any other condition.

Have you checked your logs for possible vote stuffing?

alecperkins7• 15 years ago

Not yet, though IP addresses are one of the metrics for each vote. I'm still working on efficient ways of going through everything.

egypturnash• 15 years ago

I'm getting nothing but "1800".

alecperkins7• 15 years ago

Momentary stupidity on my part. I told it to cache the expire time instead of the actual value. Oops. Go figure, it was the one time I think "Eh, this is a small change. I don't need to go to a testing version first."

chromejs10• 15 years ago

I'm surprised the number 1 wasn't higher up because of the slider (since it defaults to 1). I guess people aren't as lazy as I thought they were and actually took the effort to move the slider :P

Results for: Pick a number from 1 to 10

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