DSD

After more than 3/4 of a mil­lion guesses, in over 50,000 games played in 67 coun­tries, the results are clear: Sci­ence sounds like gobbledygook.

arXiv vs. snarXiv has been live for 6 months now, and it’s time to take a look at the results. Here’s how the game works. The user sees two titles: one is the title of an actual the­o­ret­i­cal high energy physics paper on the arXiv, and the other is a com­pletely fake title ran­domly gen­er­ated by the snarXiv. The user guesses which one is real, finds out if they’re right or wrong, and then starts over with a new pair of titles.

I’ve been record­ing the result of each guess, orig­i­nally just out of curios­ity. I never expected to get rea­son­able sta­tis­tics on the over 120,000 high energy the­ory papers on the arXiv. But after more than 750,000 guesses, that’s exactly what I’ve got, which means we can do some fun stuff. Con­tinue reading…