Saturday, March 13, 2010

Randomness

Randomness is a tricky thing. Open up a text document and put your a finger on two different keys (for instance 1 and 0). Now very rapidly type a sequence of those two characters (taking about five seconds to do so), but try to make the sequence as random as possible.

Here is what I got:

1010100000100001010100100101011010101011

How random is your sequence? (Mine is pretty nonrandom.) Think about ways of measuring its randomness.

2 comments:

  1. Hi. I like this question. How to measure the randomness of a series of 1's and 0's? It wouldn't do any good to measure the probability of the event (the entire series) as all events would be equally likely. I think it would help to rephrase the question and measure the prominence of patterns in the series. This could be accomplished by determining a percent match between the given series and a proposed pattern. How to combine the percent matches for different patterns is another question, but a necessary one since we should want a single measurement of randomness. And also, what patterns are indicative of a nonrandom agent producing the series? I hope there is a more elegant solution to the puzzle!

    ReplyDelete
  2. go go mathematic

    thanks and keep contact

    ReplyDelete

 

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