hinkley • 5 days ago

> the order of their authorship was determined by executing the following commands in R:

    set.seed (7998976/5271)
    x ‹- sample (c("Anne", "Peder"), 1)
    print (paste ("The winner is", x, "!"))
But who picked the seed, Anne? And how do we know they didn’t have their thumb on the scale?

4
zvorygin • 5 days ago

My guess is that each simultaneously picked a number, one for numerator and one for denominator.

1 reply
hinkley • 5 days ago

Hopefully. Though I wonder if that can be gamed if you pick the denominator and the value is rounded. Eg a large prime.

fph • 5 days ago

That is weird; from what I understand (not an R expert), set.seed takes an integer, so I assume that number gets truncated / approximated to an integer. That means that all nearby seeds give the same result: for instance changing 7998976 to 7998977 or 7998975 makes no difference, up to the next multiple of 5271. This makes the result look a lot less random. Was Anne cheating?

1 reply
madcaptenor • 5 days ago

From the documentation at https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/base/html/Rand..., seed is "a single value, interpreted as an integer, or NULL (see ‘Details’)." From some quick testing it appears that "interpreted" means "truncated".

madcaptenor • 5 days ago

I was wondering if this number was somehow significant in the paper, but it doesn't seem to be: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/251524591877096...

_Algernon_ • 5 days ago

Maybe we can solve this with blockchain?

1 reply
JohnKemeny • 5 days ago

Or maybe quantum?