A test of |-|erc's psychic abilities.

The story so far.

As usual, I seem to put my foot into it. |-|erc (<trymyform@wwwadamskingdom.com>) is reputed to be a highly capable psychic, so I posited a very simple (at least, to my way of thinking; psychics may think differently) test.

My original challenge detailed the requirements. I've already recorded the guess, with md5sum a5d2d18d025a2451d82629987cbb7c52, on my home computer. So far, I have the following responses.

  1. The digit '6', with the ground rules he wanted.
  2. My response..
  3. His confusion.
  4. My response..
  5. '3'..
  6. My response..
  7. '4'..
  8. My response..
  9. '7'..
  10. My response..
  11. '2', with a puzzling comment..
  12. My response -- for various reasons, I wanted to change from 2.2 to 2.4 on this machine so the applet went kaphut. (Sorry |-|erc. Not that it matters; you were losing badly anyway. :-) ).
  13. |-|erc for some reason treated it as a victory.
I'm not sure if he was trying to throw 5 guesses at the first digit (with me confirming the first 4 are wrong!) or what; his one response suggested that he wanted me to confirm or deny the first digit, then move on to the next after 5 posts if he's unsuccessful -- and he was definitely very successful in being unsuccessful. A slightly bizarre methodology, and one which is not a great test; the probabilities are as follows: Total probability of success for the first digit: 40951 in 100000. Over 20 digits this give an approximate probability for the entire number of about 1.76*10-8. This helps the psychic considerably as opposed to a straight 20-digit guess, which has a probability of 10-20.

Honesty.

I should be honest here. I don't believe this malarky. I don't believe he has a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding. However, I also want to ensure that he can't accuse me of doing something stupid, like changing a digit (or the entire number!) at the last minute. Therefore, I've already recorded the guess in a file ('trynumber1') and, in my post, supplied the md5sum. Since md5sums are 32-digit (128-bit) cryptographically-hard to decipher, I'm giving |-|erc a fair shake here, at least so I think. Of course he has an interesting (and somewhat valid) complaint, in that this isn't the most interesting of tests.

To which I say, "Tough". If one is a true psychic, one should be able to read 20 digits, no problem, which has lots of applications, from stealing credit cards to tracking stock funds and buying/selling options thereon. For instance, the psychic might read that Ajax Amalgamated Stock Funds is planning a huge purchase of Acme Widgets, Inc. tomorrow, with surplus cash. I for one would find that slightly unethical, but damned useful.

This is not to say I think |-|erc is a con man, at least not intentionally; I think, however, that he may be deluding himself here.

More honesty.

It turned out loading GIMP was a lot faster than I thought (Squid was wonderful!) so I'm going to capture a screenshot of my website and eventually put it here. You can now follow the above link, as |-|erc and I have more or less given up on this contest. This is mostly to prove to anyone who cares that I actually deployed the randomizer applet on my desktop so that I could occasionally glance at it, and thereby allow |-|erc to pick up my brainwaves. The md5sum of this screenshot is b4d17d2b611f83dc10a8764859fda5af.

Source code

At some point I might clean this up and put it into proper form but for now the applet is extremely simple, consisting of the following files: It requires Gtk and Gnome, and sits in the panel displaying a random number after 20 clicks. Each click generates another random digit (the actual digits are picked up from the 10 millisecond digit in gettimeofday()).