Measured Affect of Mind on Matter by PEAR

So, I've been looking for some mind-matter data to help me get a bearing of, "is Psychic Ball getting the expected results, is this a fun game mechanic," etc. and I found this to be right up my alley.

From http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/correlations.pdf (top of page 7)

Consistent with the terminal values listed in Table 1, the average slopes of these two patterns of
achievement, in units of bits deviation per bit processed, are roughly 1.3 × 10–4 and –7.8 × 10–5
respectively.

What that's saying is that people were able to affect the random distribution by about +0.013% when trying to increase the number of events and -0.0078% when trying to decrease the number of events.

I ran the calculation for Psychic Ball, and if you can have a +0.01% affect on the number of 1s that come up in 10,000 calls of rand(0,1) in the PHP script (which Princeton's PEAR suggests that you can), then you increase your chance of winning a point from 50.4% to 51.2%. (The 50.4% is actually because there is roughly a 0.4% chance of splitting 5,000 to 5,000, and right now I'm giving red the tie. I know, not fair, I need to change it. Don't worry, all the data is dated, so I can mark it and distinguish it when I make a change.)

So, the summary is this: Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) shows that on average, people can affect the distribution of random events by more than +0.013%. So shoot for a points won percentage of 51.2% or higher against the computer. Once playing other players is implemented, it will be a whole new ball game.

Keep playing Psychic Ball at http://psychicballgame.com!