Mastodawn

Had a lot of fun with my stats students today. I gave them two data sets. One from a random number generator, the other was one I made up that was not random, but designed to look random. They were able to figure out which one was fake.

Then we had ChatGPT make the same kind of data set (random numbers 1-6 set of 100) and it had the same problems as my fake set but in a different way.

We talked about the study about AI generated passwords.

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myrmepropagandist Feb 20

"Why don't you just load a library to find the mean and SD?"

Because I'M OLD. I like to write my own function. I do it for integration sometimes... kids these days.

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Lawrence Miller Feb 20

@futurebird I know how to find the SD and I will use the php-stats library every day of the week and twice on Sunday. I would much rather be able to depend on well supported community code. (At least until it is all replaced by ai slop)

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sabik

@ldpm @futurebird
AIUI, there's also that the formulas for mean and especially stdev that we learn in school don't work great with the way we represent floating point numbers in computers, with the way rounding works with those, and hopefully the stats library uses more obscure formulas that take care of that, what they call "numerical stability"