Beat The Machine

Can you beat the machine? We, at Final, see the future in data - specifically, financial market data. According to the efficient market’s hypothesis, share prices reflect all information and consistent, reliable prediction of the future share price should be impossible. We challenge this hypothesis daily.

Let's play a simple game! A microcosm of the financial markets if you will. You start with 1000$ in your bank account, and you are given two simple action options - buy or sell. Each round, the machine will try and guess what your next move will be. Your job is to try and be as random as you can when selecting your action. Every time the machine guesses your move correctly, your balance will shrink by 1$. However, should it guess wrong, you will earn a whopping 1.05$!!

If you believe you can be random enough, this should be easy money! BTW, if (when) you give up, and need a little help, the "randomize!" button will enter 10 random actions for you, so that on average you will start winning.

So... Are you up to the challenge?

So how does it work exactly? Your fingers tend to repeat certain patterns even if you don't notice it. The program keeps a database of each possible combination of 5 presses, and two counters are stored under each entry — one is for every zero that follows the combination, and the other one is for all the ones that follow this combination. So every time you press a key, an entry in the database gets updated. To make a prediction, the program needs only to look up the entry corresponding to the last 5 presses and decide by looking at the counters which key press is more likely to follow. The probability of the program guessing your inputs >57% (µ+2σ) of the time purely by chance is very slim, which suggests that you really aren't good at making random choices :)