Sto leggendo "Rock Breaks Scissors", che descrive due "macchine di outguessing" costruite ai Bell Labs che cercano di sfruttare la non-casualità umana nel gioco di matching pennies . C'era una macchina di inversione costruita dal famoso Claude Shannon e una costruita da Dave Hagelbarger.
Le macchine hanno funzionato in questo modo (citato dal libro):
Suppose you win twice in a row with the same choice. What would you pick next? You could stick with the choice that's been winning - or you could switch, perhaps on the grounds that three times in a row wouldn't be "random."
Each time a particular situation occurred, [Shannon's] machine archived what the player had decided. Every decision was encoded as a 1 or 0 and slotted into one of the machine's 16 precious bits of memory. For each of the eight given situations, Shannon's machine cataloged the last two decisions only. That filled the machine's 16 bits.
When the machine needed to predict, it looked at what the player had done the last two times that the same situation had occurred. Whenever the player's response had been identical both times, the machine predicted that the player would do the same thing once again. Otherwise, it guessed randomly from its [random number generator].
The main difference between Shannon's machine and Hagelbarger's was that Shannon's was simpler. Hagelbarger's machine kept track of a percentage of outcomes for each of the eight situations. The higher the percentage, the more likely Hagelbarger's machine was to predict a repeat of the past. This may sound more reasonable and nuanced than Shannon's all-or-nothing approach, but in practice, Shannon's device was the better predictor.
La macchina di Shannon ha battuto gli umani ad un ritmo superiore a quello di Hagelbarger, e ha anche battuto la macchina di Hagelbarger quando si sono giocati a vicenda. Non capisco perché l'approccio più semplice di Shannon sia stato significativamente migliore dell'approccio basato sulla percentuale di Hagelbarger.