Aaronson's Oracle: what is this curious algorithm?

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

These questions are the ones that can be asked when we talk about the Aaronson's oracle, a seemingly simple algorithm which, 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 taking into account that a simple program of computer is capable of knowing how we are going to behave based on how we are responding, it is not mucus of Turkey. Let's see it next.

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What is Aaronson's oracle?

Aaronson's oracle consists of a computer program which has been shown to have a high predictive capacity of human decisions.

The algorithm behind this program was developed by Scott Aaronson and, through a task that must make the participant, the program is capable of knowing what will be the next key to be press. The person is in front of a computer with the program on and

you must press the D or F keys as many times as you want and in the order you want.

While the person is pressing keys, the oracle will give feedback, indicating if the key pressed was the one he had in mind or not. That is, the oracle indicates whether it was correct in predicting that the person would press the D key or the F key.

How does it work?

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

To understand it better, let's consider the following case. We have typed at some point the following sequence D-D-D-F-F-F. The algorithm will have memorized it and, if it happens that we have just typed the following sequence D-D-D-F-F, the oracle will most likely state that the next key pressed will be another f. Of course we could type D and cause the oracle to be wrong, but it can be said that, later in the sequences, the algorithm's prediction percentage is greater than 60%.

When we are pressing the first keys, the oracle prediction percentage will not be high. This is because we have just put information, that is, there are no previous sequences and, therefore, there is no antecedent that can be linked to the information immediately put. On the first try, the oracle is unable to predict whether we are going to put a D or an F. This decision can be completely random, and therefore the oracle will not be more than 50% certain.

However, once we have already put several key sequences, the program will predict our behavior pattern with greater precision. The more keys pressed, the more information and, therefore, the more capable it is of knowing if the next thing is going to be a D or an F. In its web version you can see the success rates. If these are less than 50%, it means that the oracle is not correct, 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. He ends up using our decision against us, making us see that, despite the fact that we had supposedly done it freely, it really is not so.

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Are we that predictable?

Based on what has been seen with Aaronson's oracle, consisting of a simple computer algorithm, it is necessary to open the debate on whether the being human, who has always displayed his free will, really has such a gift or, on the contrary, is nothing more than a simple delusion.

The idea behind the concept of free will is that people behave completely independent of our previous acts and stimuli present in our immediate environment and nearby. That is, regardless of what we have done or what we see, hear or feel, our behaviors can be consciously decided and unrelated to the past and the environment. In summary, free will comes to say 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 determine our actions. No matter how conscious and owners we believe 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, each one the cause of the next.

Seeing these definitions, one can think that yes, indeed, the idea that yesterday, last week, every day of the previous month or even since years we have eaten at two in the afternoon it is a fact that, most likely, will be repeated tomorrow, however, this does not mean that it determines that tomorrow I will go to pass. In other words, although it is very likely that we will eat at two o'clock tomorrow, 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 As human beings, despite the fact that we try not to be predictable, we end up being so.. Even trying to prevent a simple computer program from knowing which key we are going to press, for the simple fact of pressing the other, we are already being predictable, since the computer has advanced. We have already given her enough information to know how we are going to behave.

Anterograde amnesia and repeated behaviors: The case of Mary Sue

Some time ago a woman became famous for, unfortunately, a symptom of her transient global amnesia which turned out to arouse the curiosity of the network. The lady, named Mary Sue, appeared in a video recorded by her daughter, in which she had a conversation.

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

These types of repeated conversations are common in people who suffer from anterograde amnesia. and, in fact, they have been widely documented, in addition to serving to shed some light on the problem that concerns us here: are our decisions free? The problem that prevents us from checking if a decision we have made in the past was the result of our assumption 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 talked, time passed a bit, and suddenly, it was as if she went back in time. Back at the beginning, Mary Sue began to ask the same questions, to say the same answers.. Suffering from anterograde amnesia, she was unable to generate new memories, whereupon her brain was constantly resetting and, having the same triggering events, she carried out the same behavior.

With the case of Mary Sue we could come to the conclusion 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 other that is being manufactured, are capable of knowing how we are going to behave.

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

However, and as a final reflection, it is important to say that, although interesting, no computer program nor will experiment be able to decisively resolve a philosophical debate as old as itself world. Although scientific research has helped to understand the human being, it is really difficult to understand how we come to behave in natural situations, and not in laboratory contexts.

Scott Aaronson and computer science

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

He has won several awards for his research, receiving the Alan T. Waterman Award in 2012, as well as the Award for the best Scientific Paper on Computing in Russia in 2011, for his work The Equivalence of Sampling and Searching. Among his most notable works is the Complexity Zoo, a wiki cataloging various computations pertaining to computational complexity theory.

He is the author of the blog Shtetl-Optimized, in addition to having written the essay Who Can Name the Bigger Number? (“Who can say the largest number?”), work which has been widely reported 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.