3 ms·

Unpredictability != randomness

• simonh 5y ago
  That's true, there's always superdeterminism.
• naasking 5y ago
  I'm not sure that's true anymore. Both truly unpredictable and "truly random" phenomena (whatever that means) are incompressible and thus unpredictable. I think they are largely interchangeable, formally.
  • CuriouslyC 5y ago
    The digits of pi are incompressible and unpredictable, yielding only to computation, but definitely not random. The word random implies a lack of order that we can't rightly claim knowledge of.
    • naasking 5y ago
      > The digits of pi are incompressible and unpredictable, yielding only to computation, but definitely not random The BBP formula can be used to calculate the Nth digit of pi without computing all preceding digits. I'd say that's pretty successful compression. > The word random implies a lack of order that we can't rightly claim knowledge of. That we have no knowledge of it does not entail that no such knowledge exists. That's the point I'm trying to make: we have no evidence of such a distinction, we only have evidence of our ignorance of the sequence's cause. The universe could very well be completely deterministic, in which case the set of "random" sequences is empty.