1111111111 is a random sequence

Biases in our perception of randomness

You are (probably) wrong about randomness.

I’ll show it to you. Let’s do an experiment. Pick up a pen, paper, or your favorite text editor, and manually generate a random sequence of ten characters, composed of ones and zeros.

My guess is, your answer will be:

0110100110

Probabilistically speaking, I should be right in only about 1 out of 1024 cases.
Statistically speaking, I am right way more frequently.

There is nothing wrong with 0110100110. It is a perfectly valid result. What’s striking is that there are no larger subsequences of repeating 0s or 1s. Intuitively, we consider 1111111111 not as random, but this has the same probability as any other 0-1 sequence of ten characters!

Don’t believe me? I have even performed an experiment to find out what you think is random.