August 24, 2016 at 12:36AM

Today I Learned: 1) Here's a simple little game, designed to viscerally demonstrate how bad humans are at generating random numbers: http://ift.tt/2bAHZYi The game is simple -- you come up with a series of random bits (0 or 1), and a computer algorithm guesses what your next bit will be as it goes. The best I was able to get was about 40% (that is, the algorithm was correct 60% of the time), but mostly my scores ranged in the 30-35% range. It's not even a great predictive algorithm -- random bits from random.org scored 65% against it. Speaking of which, how would you go about writing an algorithm to predict the next bit in a human-generated bit series? 2) Twitter has a way for you to download all of the data on your Twitter account in a browser-displayable format. 3) As of 2014-2016, the US and China have the largest and second-largest GDPs of any countries in the world, respectively. The combined countries of the EU are first or second, depending on who's counting, if you count them as a single country. Otherwise, third is Japan, and it's not even close between China and Japan.