The Enigma machine and de Bruijn sequences inform neuroscience analyses, including quotes from Josh Gold and Geoff Aguirre.
The Penn scientists have taken their cues from a 73-year-old algorithm that British code-breaker Alan Turing used to read secret German messages during World War II, and a mathematical sequence more famously used to break into digital keypad locks on cars.
Possible warnings for machine learning studies? "Chance" classification depends on the number of samples - if samples are not infinite, it may be higher than expected.
UPDATE: The general consensus seems to be that permutation testing, as commonly done, is valid and avoids the potential problems laid out by the authors.
Jonathan Peelle, PhD
CV: PeelleCV.pdf | Google Scholar profile
Lab: peellelab.org
Office: ISEC 320
E-mail: j.peelle123@northeastern.edu(without the 123)
Mastodon: @jpeelle@neuromatch.social
("Peelle" sounds like "peel". I blame my ancestors for the extra letters.)