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I asked Claude for 37,500 random names, and it can't stop saying Marcus
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Experiments with AI agents assessed how language models manage randomness, with Claude selected a name at random 37,500 times. The most frequently chosen male name was "Marcus," appearing 4,367 times, and Opus 4.5 produced "Marcus" 100% of the time with a simple prompt, while nine parameter combinations resulted in zero entropy.
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Hacker News · github.com
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Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-02-26.
- Praise: Injecting randomness into prompts can enhance the diversity of LLM responses, offering a practical method to overcome limitations of temperature settings.
- Concern: The repeated mention of 'Marcus' highlights a potential collapse in the model's training, raising concerns about its ability to generate truly random outputs.