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Too deep topic and maybe I don't understand it compared to the megaminds here on hacker News but as far as I get it when it comes to randomness every sequence h
by graderjs 5y ago
Too deep topic and maybe I don't understand it compared to the megaminds here on hacker News but as far as I get it when it comes to randomness every sequence has the same probability which is simply the inverse of the number of sequences for any given length.
In that case it seems to me impossible to tell from only the information of a single sequence.
But if you have multiple sequences where one is the binary coding of a Mozart symphony and another is the binary encoding of Shakespeare sonnet and another is the binary encoding of days of the week or a DNA sequence if you have enough data points like that I think you can start to say Well they're probably not random because we see coherent patterns.
The second aspect is coherent pattern depends on perspective. So what seems random to us maybe a very common physical constant to an alien civilization. so if we see a binary sequence that represents pi, maybe we say oh well that's not random because it's accurately pi to like a thousand places... but if we see another sequence that looks random maybe it's a physical constant to an alien civilization that's accurate to a thousand places as well. But we don't know that so it looks random...to us. So randomness doesn't just depend on entropy, I think in a realistic point of view, probability is not enough, it also depends on something which Maybe it's a little bit harder to measure perhaps which is perspective. Random depends on the context.
- sacrosancty 5y agoI think your way of looking at it requires an explosion of alien civilisations to find one in which our random 1000 digits is their special number. If you generate 1 extra digit, you'd need 10x as many civilizations to expect a match. Getting back to the experiment, obviously it's measuring the human mind so the context is the person's mind. They might enter their bank account number which looks random to the researchers but is actually cheating because they're not using their brain as the source of randomness.
- graderjs 5y agoThat's an interesting point about the random sequence selected what's the chance it matches an alien civilization constant. I didn't think about that way. I guess I thought about it more from your other example point of view, where say an alien civilization pretends to be a human and gives you a number that they say is random (just like the guy giving you his bank account number) but actually the alien civilization gave you a physical constant. It's interesting that there's a difference but it's sort of like the difference between you picking a random sequence from a random source and the probability of that being actually random versus you being given a supposedly random sequence by somebody and the probability of that being actually random. I think.
- sacrosancty 5y agoYea I guess we couldn't tell if somebody gave us a number that was special to them but appeared random. Afterall, the alien's physical constant (or rather, the arbitrary definitions of their units) would have effectively been chosen by a random number generator just like ours are. If you pick a random sequence from a random source, then it's truly random by definition, isn't it? Even if it happens to be 1111111. It might score badly on a randomness measure but no randomness measure is truly perfect.
- feral 5y agoI think this is the idea you are looking for: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity