Si o No

I would have to lean towards No.

I receive Embedded Systems Programming - recently renamed Embedded Systems Design - at the office. Last year there were some excellent articles on what I believe you are actually referring to: PRNG"s (Pseudo Random Number Generators).

http://www.embedded.com//showArticle.jhtml...icleID=20900500

The math is very straighforward, at least it was for me.

The problem with "proving" something like randomness is you quickly enter a paradox. If it isn't random, you'll see repetition - eventually. How long to you look? A week? How about a month? A year?? Ten years?

I admit it's fun to play with the math though. Keeps you sharp.

 

i don't know about numbers, but my results in the lab seem to be rather random lately...

 

I disagree. I believe that nature is full of randomness. It's only our attempts to immitate randomness with a mathematical formula that are doomed to fail.

 

you realize without the accent on the "si" it really means "if" in English.

so, of course, No.

 

Oh, I thought it was Portuguese and meant "itself."

For instance?

 

i voted no; everything happens a certain way, for a particular reason, right?

 

Lava lamps. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?...8&RS=PN/5732138

 

LOL that is very good!!!

 

Actually, I think that almost everything in nature is random. The cosmic background radiation, gene mutations, when a given radioactive atom splits... radiation in general has a random factor imposed on a half-life that is fixed for a given isotope... whether a particular dog will eat cat poop, given the opportunity... nature is all random. The exact branching structure of a tree is random. And I suspect that the original distribution of matter in the universe, before gravitation began to magnify the variations, was random.

I cannot prove any of the above. But this is my opinion.

 

Speaking as a mathematician (ahem, ahem): I think randomness is big in the middle, and thin at both ends.

And that's my theory.

And now for the science part of our show...

Actually, I think it might be best to determine what we mean by "random":

• Unpredictable: Numbers appear without any pattern, cycle, or way to predict them. (I keep thinking that someone got this by putting a cosmic particle (i.e., cosmic rays) detector out in the middle of a field somewhere.)
• Non-cyclical, but evenly-distributed: What we often want when we ask for a random number -- something that will come up with a number from a set of numbers; but, over time, will generally pick all of the items within the set. (Think your iPod or VAIS AIC-100i's "RAND" mode.)

 

That was indeed the point of that post

 

I think you're onto something, Bookrats. That's why iTunes let's you adjust the "randomness" of its picking. If truly random, it might play the same song twice in a row, which most people would not consider random at all. And here we're only picking from a finite set...

Think of the infinite universe, and the next one right next to it.

 

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