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> As a first step, we could check whether the digits 0 through 9 appeared with approximately equal frequency, among, say, the first million digits. Passing such
by azth 13y ago
> As a first step, we could check whether the digits 0 through 9 appeared with approximately equal frequency, among, say, the first million digits. Passing such a test is clearly necessary for randomness...
Why is that the case? This just means that the digits are uniformly distributed. Why can't they have a different distribution and still be "random"?
- j2kun 13y agoI think he is appealing to intuition here, where randomness means you can't predict the next drawn value with accuracy better than uniform. But you're right, you can draw randomly according to a different distribution. However, if you allow any distribution in your definition of "random" then you get the constant distributions. It's not very intuitively random anymore. So the question becomes, how do you pick which distributions are allowed and which aren't?