Too Even to Be Random
Real randomness clumps — it streaks and huddles far more than our tidy intuition expects. Play the games below and watch your own sense of “random” give itself away.
Spot the Real One
One of these strips is 100 honest coin flips (teal = heads). The other was made by a person trying to look random. Click the one you think is the real flips.
Be the Coin
Tap out a sequence that you think looks random. Then let the detector compare your longest streak to thousands of honest sequences the same length.
Randomness in Space
Scatter points truly at random and clumps and empty voids appear on their own. The tidy, evenly-spaced version is the one that could never happen by chance.
Coin runs: an honest 100-flip sequence contains a streak of five-or-more about 97% of the time, and its longest run is 6 or 7 on average. Spatial clumping is measured with a nearest-neighbour ratio (about 1.0 for true randomness, well above 1.0 for a deliberately even layout).