randomness
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007Read 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.