Human-generated random numbers are usually odd.
By
Ryan Grove
on March 19, 2007
I suspect this is what Atom Dude meant by the inspiring claim, but that claim's wording was too general. He may also have been referring to computer-generated pseudorandom numbers, but I don't know enough about that topic to comment on it.
When you ask a person to pick a random number, they'll usually choose an odd number that doesn't end in 5. As a side-effect, many human-generated random numbers are prime. This is why humans are a horrible source of random numbers.
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Discussion (6)
Incidentally, odd numbers have been statistically shown to be easier to remember. Many also believe that stories are more believable when odd numbers are used: "Yeah man, we were going like 93 when the cop saw us!"
Odd numbers are also less likely to get you audited by the IRS.
This sounds like a good use for Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
I will pay you $0.003 to pick a "random" number between 1 and 100.
$5 will get you like 1600+ numbers.
Human generated random numbers usually end with 3
please tag "psychology"
The phenomenon being discussed doesn't seem to be both of "human-generated" and "random numbers". One or both of those is a bad fit for this.