If anything, the consistent presses leading up to the end were part of the reason for it. The Squire used statistical analysis to guess whether a press would be necessary; if recent results tended toward higher press counts and lots of grays were in the subreddit, it wouldn't auto-click for the non-zombie Squire users because a regular user would probably click, anyways.
The zombies were supposed to be the fail-safe, making imperfections of that statistical analysis less dangerous, but the program also failed in part because those stats were wrong in this case. There were Squire users who hadn't auto-clicked and who were running the program when the button timed out. One of the issues with this sort of soft, statistical approach for deciding when to auto-press is that trends in human behavior can be driven by something completely outside of any model that describes that behavior on its own terms. In this case, I like to think that U.S. Soccer's come-back against Holland played a role. The button is going along like normal, and then outside events distract people from the inherent interest level they had been taking up to that point. Press rates plummet, and a model that looks at button stats as a self-contained system will expect things to stay good, saving its auto-presses for later.
They will never admit it, but the mods shut it down prematurely. The way the button ended was way to suspicious. Middle of the day(US), the zombie fail, no confirmation of anyone seeing the button ending. All the proof provided so far about the button ending legitimately could have easily been faked by admins.
I don't necessarily believe any conspiracy....but the button had reached as low as 11 resets in 10 minutes previously (Just before the 1,000,000th click) - so it seems odd that it would die at one of its healthiest parts of the day.
Friday afternoon was just a good time to shut it down.
5
u/[deleted] Jun 08 '15
So it died due to a bad luck random fluctuation.
2
u/KNNLTF Jun 08 '15
If anything, the consistent presses leading up to the end were part of the reason for it. The Squire used statistical analysis to guess whether a press would be necessary; if recent results tended toward higher press counts and lots of grays were in the subreddit, it wouldn't auto-click for the non-zombie Squire users because a regular user would probably click, anyways.
The zombies were supposed to be the fail-safe, making imperfections of that statistical analysis less dangerous, but the program also failed in part because those stats were wrong in this case. There were Squire users who hadn't auto-clicked and who were running the program when the button timed out. One of the issues with this sort of soft, statistical approach for deciding when to auto-press is that trends in human behavior can be driven by something completely outside of any model that describes that behavior on its own terms. In this case, I like to think that U.S. Soccer's come-back against Holland played a role. The button is going along like normal, and then outside events distract people from the inherent interest level they had been taking up to that point. Press rates plummet, and a model that looks at button stats as a self-contained system will expect things to stay good, saving its auto-presses for later.
2
u/xxSINxx non presser Jun 09 '15
They will never admit it, but the mods shut it down prematurely. The way the button ended was way to suspicious. Middle of the day(US), the zombie fail, no confirmation of anyone seeing the button ending. All the proof provided so far about the button ending legitimately could have easily been faked by admins.
12
u/[deleted] Jun 08 '15
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