musings on interesting ideas

Following on from yesterday’s post on randomness - here are some thoughts about randomness and luck.

How to win (more) on the lottery.

The lottery is random but strangely most people will fill in their lottery form in a non-random way. They may use birthdays or ages etc. which do not fall into a random pattern. SO if the lottery is random and people are filling in their forms non-randomly then if they do win a major prize this means that they are more likely to win less as they will have to share their prize with other people. Of course they are just as likely to win with their number selection as anyone else (because the lottery is random) but they are more likely to have to share their prize (because people are not random).

So if you do want to win more in the lottery then is quite simple - all you have to do is fill in your lottery form randomly - or maybe this is not quite as simple as it first sounds!

Digging in the Sand

Imagine that someone has buried some gold in a sand pit. They have buried it in a random position in the sand pit and you do not know where they have buried it. You do not know how many people have already been digging in the sand pit. I give you a shovel and tell you that you are allowed to dig in one and only one place. If you look at the following diagram (looking down on the sand pit) just imagine the point where you would dig - just choose the first spot where you would dig - don’t change it because you suspect there may be a trick in this.

The sand pit:

Now scroll down to the next diagram.

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Did you dig in the green shaded area?

The vast majority of people do. So if you did dig in the green shaded area you are much less likely to find the gold (because someone is much more likely to have dug it up already). If you didn’t dig in the green area then you are much more likely to find the gold.

The point is that behaving in a random way in systems where people (who do not behave randomly) are involved can give you a considerable edge.

The sand box idea was adapted from the book “Did you spot the Gorilla” by Richard Wiseman (an excellent read!)

Read an interesting article on randomness some time ago. The idea is that some things may or may not be random - it depends on the way you look at them!

For instance is the flipping of a coin random (and if it is how does the coin know how to behave randomly?). Theoretically how a coin lands should be determinable - if we could measure the velocity and spin etc. then we could predict how it would land. The challenge of course is that this is challenging to do in real time. So maybe the coin is not behaving randomly it is just that we do not have the processing power to predict it.

Another “type” of randomness is stuff that we just don’t understand. if we do not know enough about a system we may very well be tempted to say it is random.

Randomness can also be a useful idea just as an idea. For instance if you want to predict the behaviour of gases you can take two views.

1. The macroscopic view - forget about molecules and just think about Pressure, Temperature and Volume (Remember Boyle’s Law and Charle’s Law from school ?). Using these ideas then we can say what will happen to the pressure if we change the temperature.

2. The Microscopic view - if we think about the molecules we “cannot” predict what each molecule will do but statistically we can predict the overall effects and if we know what a change in temperature is then we can work out the pressure change (which luckily enough gives us the same answer as the first way).

Or are there some things that are really random?

So to summarise - we consider things to be random because:

1. They are too hard to work out

2. We don’t understand how the system works

3. It is convenient to think of them as random

4. Maybe they are random!

Ian Moore

Treepax Ltd.

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Blog created on 30/10/07