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Then what about the digits of π? Wikipedia says that "The decimal digits of π appear to be randomly distributed,[a] but no proof of this conjecture has been fou

Then what about the digits of π? Wikipedia says that "The decimal digits of π appear to be randomly distributed,[a] but no proof of this conjecture has been found"; note [a]: "In particular, π is conjectured to be a normal number, which implies a specific kind of statistical randomness on its digits in all bases." So that sounds pretty random to me, yet there are algorithms that give you π in its decimal form, and as far as I can remember there are even ways to compute the n-th digit of π without having to compute the preceding ones—which sounds pretty determined to me.

griffzhowl 2y ago
The digits of pi can pass some statistical tests of randomness but isn't in fact random, because it's the digits of pi - as you note there's an algorithm for producing it. As I mentioned, there are some problems with giving a rigorous definition of randomness, but one of the main approaches is through Kolmogorov complexity: "Kolmogorov's definition of a random string was that it is random if it has no description shorter than itself via a universal Turing machine." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sequence#Modern_approaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sequence#Modern_approac...