I Big Bell Test Collaboration: Challenging Local Realism with Human Choices

DrChinese
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Not sure if this reference has been posted yet, but I just saw it come through and thought I'd share. This is the "Big Bell Test Collaboration" using measurement choices provided by persons (as opposed to computer generated "random" choices). (The authors are a virtual who's who in the world of entanglement.)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04431

"A Bell test, which challenges the philosophical worldview of local realism against experimental observations, is a randomized trial requiring spatially-distributed entanglement, fast and high-efficiency detection, and unpredictable measurement settings. While technology can perfect the first two of these, and while technological randomness sources enable device-independent protocols based on Bell inequality violation, challenging local realism using physical randomizers inevitably makes assumptions about the same physics one aims to test. Bell himself noted this weakness of physical setting choices and argued that human free will could rigorously be used to assure unpredictability in Bell tests. Here we report a suite of local realism tests using human choices, avoiding assumptions about predictability in physics. We recruited ~100,000 human participants to play an online video game that incentivizes fast, sustained input of unpredictable bits while also illustrating Bell test methodology. The participants generated 97,347,490 binary choices, which were directed via a scalable web platform to twelve laboratories on five continents, in which 13 experiments tested local realism using photons, single atoms, atomic ensembles, and superconducting devices. Over a 12-hour period on the 30 Nov. 2016, participants worldwide provided a sustained flow of over 1000 bits/s to the experiments, which used different human-generated bits to choose each measurement setting. The observed correlations strongly contradict local realism and other realist positions in bi-partite and tri-partite scenarios. Project outcomes include closing of the freedom-of-choice loophole, gamification of statistical and quantum non-locality concepts, new methods for quantum-secured communications, a very large dataset of human-generated randomness, and networking techniques for global participation in experimental science."
 
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Is this better than coin flipping?
 
I was happy to take part as one of the people from around the world!
 
StevieTNZ said:
I was happy to take part as one of the people from around the world!

You are a superdeterministic person :)
 
So, quantum mechanics as usual?
 
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Humans are not good pseudo-random number generators, even when they give their best. For instance, suppose that we want to generate a random sequence of digits from 0 to 9. If some digit is 7, the probability that the next digit is also 7 is 1/10. However, if a human chooses that one digit is 7, the probability that his next choice will also be 7 is typically less than 1/10. Typically, human choices of wannabe random sequences show an antibunching effect.

One example of such an antibunching effect can be seen in my own attempt to distribute points "randomly" in Fig. 2 of http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0904.2287 .(Fortunately, this does not affect the results of this paper.)
 
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Demystifier said:
Humans are not good pseudo-random number generators

The point of big Bell test is not to generate unpredictable random numbers, computer RNGs as you said are better than humans in that. The point of the test is to close the freedom of choice loophole.
 
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