<story><title>How to pick a random number from 1-10</title><url>https://torvaney.github.io/projects/human-rng</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justinpombrio</author><text>...or just add up the answers mod 10.&lt;p&gt;This has the property that if even a &lt;i&gt;single person&lt;/i&gt; answers uniformly at random, then the final number you compute will be uniformly random, regardless of how everyone else answers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>testplzignore</author><text>Paradoxically, this may be the best answer because it is not the best answer.&lt;p&gt;In a room of 8500 people, it is likely that there is someone in the room smarter than you and knows a better way to pick random numbers. Come into the room and tell everyone that your objective is to pick a random number from 1-10. Maybe even go as far as to tell them your mod 10 idea. Wait a bit to let them to think about it, then start asking for the random numbers. It is likely that someone will have come up with a better way to pick a random number than your mod 10 solution, and thus their answer will be more uniformly random that what your solution can produce. And thus your solution becomes at least as uniformly random as theirs.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to pick a random number from 1-10</title><url>https://torvaney.github.io/projects/human-rng</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justinpombrio</author><text>...or just add up the answers mod 10.&lt;p&gt;This has the property that if even a &lt;i&gt;single person&lt;/i&gt; answers uniformly at random, then the final number you compute will be uniformly random, regardless of how everyone else answers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moultano</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love to see something written up about how quickly this converges, assuming the variables are i.i.d and distributed according to the distribution in the article.</text></comment>