Suppose you are told to attempt to produce a sting of zeros and ones which is completely random. Of course, one would like to believe that one could act totally random. But it is easy to write a computer program which gets as input a sample of some of the random sequences you produce and then, based on this sample, the program can be used to predict what you will produce if you re-attempt producing sequences with a probability of successfully predicting you which is better than chance. Scott Aaronson (who is visiting here from Berkeley) performed such an experiment and found that only one of the students he tested the program on could beat the program (in the sense of the program being unable to correctly predict the students sequences more than would be expected from chance.) Scott expressed this as “only one of my students had free will.”
Well the question I want to answer, is what happens to this effect as a function of the inebriation of the individual being tested. Do drunks have more or less free will than those who are sober? Perhaps a quantum beer night would help settle this question!
O brave new quantum world!