Aaronson’s Oracle: what is this curious algorithm?

Aaronson's oracle consists of a program that predicts human behavior.

Do we have free will or are our behaviors predetermined? Are we as free as we think we are?

These are the questions that can be asked when we talk about the Aaronson oracle. Aaronson's oracle, a seemingly simple algorithm, which, while limiting that, despite limiting itself to studying which keys we press, is capable of knowing which ones we are going to press next.

It may seem simple and uninteresting, but considering that a simple computer program is able to know how we are going to behave based on how we are responding, it is no small feat. Let's take a look at it below.

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What is Aaronson's oracle?

Aaronson's oracle consists of a computer program which has proven to have a high capacity to predict human decisions..

The algorithm behind this program was developed by Scott Aaronson and, by means of a task to be done by the participant, the program is able to know what the next key to be pressed is going to be. The person stands in front of a computer with the program on and must press the D or F keys. must press the keys D or F as many times as he/she wants and in the order he/she wants to press them..

While the person is pressing keys, the oracle will give feedback, indicating whether the key pressed was the one he/she had in mind or not. In other words, the oracle indicates whether it was right in predicting that the person would press the D or F key.

How does it work?

As we have already seen, despite the mysterious name, Aaronson's oracle is nothing more than an algorithm behind a computer program. This is responsible for analyzing the 32 different possible sequences of five letters, made up of the D and F keys, that the person has previously typed.that the person has previously typed. The algorithm memorizes them as the subject types them and, when the person types again a sequence that begins in a similar way to one already typed, the algorithm predicts the next letter.

To understand it better, let's take the following case. We have at some point typed the following sequence D-D-D-F-F-F-F. The algorithm will have memorized it and, if we happen to have just typed the following sequence D-D-D-D-F-F, the oracle will most likely establish that the next key pressed will be another F. Of course, we could type D and make the oracle wrong, but it must be said that, advanced the sequences, the prediction rate of the algorithm is higher than the prediction rate for the next letter, the prediction rate of the algorithm is over 60%..

When we are pressing the first keys, the prediction percentage of the oracle will not be high. This is because we have just entered information, i.e., there are no previous sequences and, therefore, there are no antecedents that can be linked to the information immediately entered. On the first try, it is impossible for the oracle to predict whether we are going to place a D or an F. This decision can be totally random, and, therefore, the oracle will not have a certainty of more than 50%.

However, once we have already typed several key sequences, the program will more accurately predict our behavioral pattern.. The more keys pressed, the more information and, therefore, the more able it is to know if the next thing is going to be a D or an F. In its web version you can see the percentages of success. If these are lower than 50% it means that the oracle is not getting it right, and higher means that it is on the right track.

The amazing thing about the program is that, even though we can try to make it get confused, the algorithm learns from it.. It ends up using our decision against us, making us see that, despite the fact that we had supposedly done it freely, it is really not so.

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Are we so predictable?

Based on what we have seen with Aaronson's oracle, consisting of a simple computer algorithm, it becomes necessary to open the debate on whether human beings, who have always boasted of their free will, really have such a gift or, on the contrary, it is nothing more than a simple illusion.

The idea behind the concept of free will is that people behave completely independently of our previous actions and the stimuli present in our immediate environment. That is, regardless of what we have done or what we see, hear or feel, our behaviors can be consciously decided and detached from the past and the environment, our behaviors can be consciously decided and unlinked to the past and the environment.. In short, free will means that nothing is written, that everything is possible.

The opposite of this concept is the idea of determinism. What we have done before, what we have already experienced or what we are experiencing right now determines our actions. no matter how conscious and masterful we think we are of our behaviors, according to determinism, they are nothing more than the result of what has already happened. They are the next link in a chain of events that are each the cause of the next.

Looking at these definitions, one may think that yes, indeed, the idea that yesterday, last week, every day of the previous month or even for years we have eaten at two o'clock in the afternoon is a fact that, most likely, will be repeated tomorrow, however, this does not mean that it determines that tomorrow will happen. That is, although it is very likely that tomorrow we will eat at two o'clock, it does not mean that we cannot change, completely randomly, the time at which we will eat the next day.

What Aaronson's oracle brings to light, however, is that human beings, even though we try not to be predictable, end up being predictable.. Even trying to prevent a simple computer program from knowing which key we are going to press, by the simple fact of pressing the other key, we are already being predictable, since the computer has already beaten us to it. We have already given you enough information to know how we are going to behave.

Anterograde amnesia and repeated behaviors: The case of Mary Sue

A while ago a woman became famous for, unfortunately, a symptom of her transient global amnesia that turned out to arouse the curiosity of the network. The woman, named Mary Sue, appeared in a video recorded by her daughter, in which she was having a conversation.

So far so normal, except for one important detail: the conversation was repeated in a loop, and lasted about nine and a half hours.. Mary Sue was repeating herself like an old cassette tape. Fortunately for the woman, her amnesia resolved itself within a day.

Such repeated conversations are a common occurrence in people who suffer from anterograde amnesia and, in fact, have been widely documented, and they serve to shed some light on the issue at hand: are our decisions free? The problem that prevents us from checking whether a decision we have made in the past was the result of our supposed free will or, on the contrary, was determined, is that we cannot travel to the past and try to modify it.

But, fortunately, cases like Mary Sue's allow us to understand this a little better. Mary Sue was, metaphorically speaking, in a time loop. She would talk, a little time would pass and, suddenly, it was as if she were returning to the past. Back to the beginning, Mary Sue would start asking the same questions, saying the same answers.. Suffering from anterograde amnesia, she could not generate new memories, so her brain would constantly reset itself and, given the same triggering events, she would perform the same behavior.

With Mary Sue's case we could conclude that we are not free, that the idea of free will is nothing more than a mere illusion and that it is totally normal that algorithms such as Aaronson's Oracle, and any others that are being manufactured, are able to know how we are going to behave.

This same question has been addressed more scientifically in the outstanding work of Koenig-Robert and Pearson (2019). In their experiment they managed to predict the decisions of the experimental subjects up to 11 seconds in advanceHowever, not in advance of the behavior itself, but before they were even aware of their own choice.

However, as a final thought, it is important to say that, although interesting, no computer program or experiment will be able to resolve, in a clear-cut way, a philosophical debate as old as the world itself. Although scientific research has helped us to understand human beings, it is really difficult to understand how we come to behave in natural situations, not laboratory contexts.

Scott Aaronson and computational science

Scott Joel Aaronson is a computer scientist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His area of research is primarily quantum computing. He has worked at MIT and has conducted postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo, USA.

He has won several awards for his research, receiving the Alan T. Waterman Award in 2012, in addition to the Best Scientific Paper on Computation in Russia Award in 2011, for his paper The Equivalence of Sampling and Searching.. Among his most notable works is the. Complexity Zoo, a wiki in which various computations pertaining to computational complexity theory are catalogued..

He is the author of the blog Shtetl-Optimizedas well as having written the essay Who Can Name the Bigger Number? (a work that has been widely disseminated in the world of computer science, and uses the concept of the Beaver Algorithm, described by Tibor Radó, to explain the limits of computability using a more pedagogical language.