pick a number

[Ike]

there's a reason for this...

I'll tell you later, but for now, pick a number between 1 and 20.

[Cam]

Edit: Got to it before the poll was ready.

[Mongo]

I am not telling which I picked

[SicEmBaylor]

Two is the loneliest number since the number one.

[Ike]

I am not telling which I picked
you don't have to. I really don't care which number anyone picks. Just that they pick one.

[Mongo]

you don't have to. I really don't care which number anyone picks. Just that they pick one.

Well, if your gonna be snooty about it, I'll take my vote back:)

[Ike]

c'mon people...pick. The fate of the world hangs on this...really.

[proud gonzo]

sweet

[SicEmBaylor]

I picked 3.

[OUAndy1807]

17 is popular

[Tailwind]

I always pick either 3 or 7.

[SicEmBaylor]

I always go with 3 or 11.

[TopDawg]

Right now numbers with a 7 in them have almost half the vote (7 and 17 = 9 of 20 votes).

[ousoonerfan]

Nine, I like nine.

[SicEmBaylor]

No love for 69?

[MamaMia]

I picked 8. I'm surprised I was not the only one. I'm usually all by my self or in very limited company in these polls. :P

[royalfan5]

17 is popular
It's cause Matt Kenseth rules.

[SleestakSooner]

Hmmm further proof I am exceedingly normal :(

[proud gonzo]

1-10: 6
1-20: 16
1-50 (and up): 42

[OCUDad]

No love for 69?Sadly, in your case, no.

[GottaHavePride]

Sadly, in your case, no.

http://static.flickr.com/46/131327718_577736f63f_o.gif

[BoogercountySooner]

I picked 8. I'm surprised I was not the only one. I'm usually all by my self or in very limited company in these polls. :P

I picked 8 also just seemed like the thing to do!

[Osce0la]

8

[Boomer.....]

I'm all in on "8"!

[SoonerStormchaser]

YO! ELEVEN!!!


Sorry, I'm still reliving the honeymoon.

[TheUnnamedSooner]

So, what does all this mean IKE?

[Ike]

In good time...

I don't want to introduce a bias.

[sooner_born_1960]

I already know the right answer, but won't tell anyone. I wouldn't want to introduce a bias.

[TheUnnamedSooner]

bias meet soonerfans, soonerfans this is bias

[sooner_born_1960]

bias meet soonerfans, soonerfans this is bias
Now you've gone and invalidated all of Ike's hard work.

[yermom]

17 is popular

weird.

[proud gonzo]

isn't 5 the right answer?
it's the next perfect number to 42, right? if you're talking about the actual definition of "perfect number" it's 6, 28, 496, 8128

[StoopTroup]

I picked lonely old 12....

Who's gonna pick 19.

19 needs love....

[Harry Beanbag]

I'm all in on 8"!


:eek:

[Boomer.....]

I'm packing 8"!

Fixed for ya Harry :D

[Harry Beanbag]

Fixed for ya Harry :D


Where exactly are you packing it?




Nevermind. ;)

[OUHOMER]

I guess i should have read the thread before I voted. If i would have known what Sicem picked i would have went with 7, or maybe 8 ( as in soon too be another MNC)

[skycat]

Without reading the thread I managed to pick the only number that had yet to be chosen.

Never tell me the odds!

[Rogue]

Do we hafta wait 'til 2/15 to find out the reason for this?

[Howzit]

hey nineteen - steely dan

[proud gonzo]

only sixteen - Dr. Hook

[Ike]

OK, so the point of this is to illustrate that people are not very good random number generators. There exists a bias toward 17 and 7 when you ask someone to pick a random number (some also claim that in larger sets of numbers, 37 exhibits similar characteristic). I got the idea to test this here from here (http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/is_17_the_most_random_number.php). In this case the guy had a much larger sample, 347, compared to the 80 picks that were here. But the effect is the same. Oddly, it would appear that on this limited sample that hillbillies are equally biased toward 7 and 17 whereas people in the other sample exhibited more of a bias toward 17 than 7.

with 80 'random' numbers, you would expect each to get roughly 4 entries each (plus or minus 2), and every number except 7 and 17 are consistent with that. 1 and 6 (and 20 if you throw out my entry) only have one entry each, but that is not very significant, whereas 7 and 17 each have 11 entries, which is nearly 4 standard deviations higher than we would expect if people were truly random in their number picking.



anyway, it was kind of fun to watch this and see everything come in almost exactly the same way it had come in in someone else's version of the same experiment.

Now you can all pat yourselves on the back and claim that you have been the subject of an experiment.

Good night.

(I was gonna do a brief statistical analysis of the distribution of numbers, but why bother. I will however throw out there that if I had a computer generate 80 random numbers, the chance that any two numbers receive more than 10 entries is roughly 1 in one million.)

[Penguin]

Well, that sure was anticlimactic.

[BoogercountySooner]

I'm abinormal I didn't pick 7 or 17!

[TheUnnamedSooner]

17 Rules, everybody knows that

[OU4LIFE]

I picked 3, cause in golf, 3 is never a bad number.

[sooner_born_1960]

I picked 3, cause in golf, 3 is never a bad number.
For me, that would be an imaginary number.

[Oldnslo]

I picked 18 and now feel randomized.

[MamaMia]

8 is my favorite number until the Sooners get one more National Championship in football. Then I will change my favorite number to 9, and so on and so forth.

If I would have been asked to pick a totally meaningless number that I had no emotional attachment to, I don't know if I would have picked 8.

[TexasLidig8r]

I picked 3, cause in golf, 3 is never a bad number.

cough... three putt.. cough...

[Newbomb Turk]

I picked 3, cause in golf, 3 is never a bad number.

3-putt is.

edit - how did I not see that last post? and the same as a whorn! :mad:

[OUinFLA]

so............we did better than a computer?
I feel good about that.
I picked 18 cause that used to be the minimum number I was looking for when I asked the question........How old are you?

[olevetonahill]

So splaine 13 coming in at 3rd ?

[BeetDigger]

only sixteen - Dr. Hook



Well, one IS the loneliest number.

[leavingthezoo]

i picked 16 but only because i couldn't pick 24 (hate the show, love the number). so, i thought add 'em. and OBVIOUSLY 2+4=6 and quite frankly i hate 6 so i thought multiply the 2 which brought me to 4 and then i multiplied that 4 by the original 4 that took us to 6, and viola.... 16!

is now a good time to mention i suck at math and science?

[Ike]

So splaine 13 coming in at 3rd ?
In reality, it's still not very far from what we should expect. at 90 picks now, we should expect from a completely random distribution is that each number has 4.5 +/- 2.1 picks. the plus or minus here really means that if we play this same game 100 times, we should expect any given number to have between 2 and 6 entries. (roughly...I'm making a simplification here that isn't quite valid for small sample sizes like this...the actual numbers are a little different, but the principle is the same). so with 13 having 7 entries, its only just barely outside of our expectations from a random distribution...I think that this says that with respect to the numbers 1-20 excluding 7 and 17, we do a decent job overall of actually picking random numbers. But for some reason or another, in general, people tend to prefer 7 and 17. Who knows why.

[proud gonzo]

prime?

i'm not surprised most people don't pick 1 or 20.

[Ike]

prime?

i'm not surprised most people don't pick 1 or 20.

If you take out 7 and 17, it would appear that people aren't biased towards or against prime numbers. here, after 92 entries now, we have 32 primes picked and 38 non-primes when removing 7 and 17. So I'm not sure that it has anything to do with prime numbers.

[proud gonzo]

well, the way I see it if you're picking a "random" number, you don't pick an even number because that doesn't seem very random. And out of the odd digits, choosing 1 is just cheating because it's only 1. and 3 is just too common to pick--threes are everywhere. things always come in threes. And 5 is smack dab in the middle, so you can't choose it. And 9 is too nice and neat because it's 3x3... so that leaves 7. (which is why I avoid it.)

but like i said, i'm just weird.

[Ike]

well, the way I see it if you're picking a "random" number, you don't pick an even number because that doesn't seem very random. And out of the odd digits, choosing 1 is just cheating because it's only 1. and 3 is just too common to pick--threes are everywhere. things always come in threes. And 5 is smack dab in the middle, so you can't choose it. And 9 is too nice and neat because it's 3x3... so that leaves 7. (which is why I avoid it.)

but like i said, i'm just weird.


this is just the point of this crappy little exercise. People think about what their random number should be. and people have tendencies to think in similar manners about their random number. Almost nobody picks one, as you said, but its clear that there is some sort of psycological and/or sociological effect that happens in peoples heads when you ask them to pick a number.

[SleestakSooner]

I also chose 17 because it was the first thing to pop into my head after I read your post.

I went back later and counted the words in your post and counting conjunctions as one word and not counting numbers as words there were exactly 17 words. Not sure if that has anything to do with skewing the outcome but I did find it interesting. ;)

[SleestakSooner]

only sixteen - Dr. Hook

"At 17 we fell in love" Too Hot - Kool and the Gang

[proud gonzo]

this is just the point of this crappy little exercise. People think about what their random number should be. and people have tendencies to think in similar manners about their random number. Almost nobody picks one, as you said, but its clear that there is some sort of psycological and/or sociological effect that happens in peoples heads when you ask them to pick a number.yep. I could go on and on about the reasons I like 6, 16, and 42. :O

[olevetonahill]

13 nuff said :D

[leavingthezoo]

6 is just a confused 9.

42... 4+2=6... so 42 is a confused 9 also.

16 is good though. :D