Claude Shannon isn’t appreciated enough for being the real founder of our information age.
This reminds me of a story of a professor asking his class to generate a random sequence of heads or tails, either by actually flipping a coin or just generating the sequence themselves, betting them he’d be able to tell the coin- vs human-based ones, and being right at an extremely high percentage.
Turned out humans are pretty bad at being random, tending to skew towards an overall equilibrium. In particular, the professor was looking for sequences of 5 (or something) identical characters, which would likely be produced by a truly random algorithm but humans would avoid.
Edit: indirect citation
