h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Randomness needs to be redefined, in my opinion. From the standpoint of one being, everything around it has a cause and an effect, so therefore, nothing can be random. Can it?

in a word, NO. but, surely if there wasn't such a thing as randomness, there wouldn't be a word for it. Perhaps its just a concept, like the I number. Perhaps the word needs redefining. The aim of my article was to show that randomness indeed may not exist, and encourages you to think about it, not to prove anything, and therefore any comments anyone has, are gladly recived.

I have always felt that the word random was a misnomer too! I first felt this way when writing computer programs in college on mainframes before there were personal computers. I discover the keyword or computer verb RAN or sometime RAND. It generated a random number, but first, you had to put in a number, a seed number to create the random number. I thought at the time that this must be a limitation in the language and better computer languages would have real random number generators instead of psuedo random numbers. As I grew older and was exposed to more comuter languages I found they all required seed numbers! What a cruel hoax, all game machines that play blackjack or similiar games relied on this same programming. Living in Las Vegas at the time I was stunned by what this meant. There were no truly random gambling machines. They all used psuedo random numbers. Too bad I left Las Vegas for Oxfordshire at that time, or I may have tried to crack these machines and ended up buried in the desert somewhere, like the programmer that programmed the Video Poker slots that would never pay off a royal straight flush. I feel that the defination of the word random should be something like this:

A process is said to be random if it yields an unknown result to an observer that does not have enough information to determine what the result should be.

For example, if you bet on number 16 on a roulette wheel and it comes up 13, you think that the result was random. Actually the ball came to rest in slot number 16 due to factors you are unable to precieve. The exact initial speed of the ball, its exact starting point, its mass, the radius of the wheel, the number,size, composition and mass of metal diamonds designed to interfere with the path of the ball and their positions, the frictional co-efficient of that particular type of wood, any imperfections in the wood, any imperfections in the ball, its rotational period, torque, etc. If you had a supercomputer and all of this data you could predict within a small margin of error the ending position of the ball. Its path is not random, just undeterminable by you.

In the same way radioactive decay is currently seen as a random process. Sometime in the future, physicists may be able to predict with great accuracy which atom may decay and when. So the random condition is seen as a lack of information, rather than an undecipherable event. Just like the guys in a science fiction film who tell the primitive people that they are going to make the sun go away when they know from astonomy that a solar eclipse is due. The primitive people see the disappearance of the sun at any time other tahn night, as a random event, becuase of their lack of information.