Quotes About Randomness

that in a random series of 101,000,007 zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros.11

if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events.

We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation.

So the relevant question is, if thousands of people are tossing coins once a year and have been doing so for decades, what are the chances that one of them, for some fifteen-year period, will toss all heads?

law of large numbers is employed because, as we've said, Bernoulli's theorem concerns the way results reflect underlying probabilities when we make a large number of observations.

true randomness sometimes produces repetition, but when users heard the same song or songs by the same artist played back-to-back, they believed the shuffling wasn't random. And so the company made the feature "less random to make it feel more random," said Apple founder Steve Jobs.12 One

there remains the big picture, the question of how much randomness contributes to where we are in life and how well we can predict where we are

Evie wanted to cry. From fear. From exhaustion, yes. But mostly from the cruel uselessness, the damned stupid arbitrariness of it all.

Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, dass der [Herrgott] nicht würfelt.

Planung ersetzt Zufall durch Irrtum.

Moshe was a tall Israeli with an ear-splitting laugh. He used it in the same way as a madman uses a gun, spraying it around with bewildering randomness. Hearing the laugh made me blink instinctively, like hearing a hammer pound on brick or metal. Our conversation was impeded by having to watch him through the strobe effect of my convulsing eyes.

Creation's the soul of haphazard.

Everything in life is luck.

you take two radioactive atoms, absolutely identical in every conceivable way, they will decay randomly. The first might decay immediately, while the second doesn't do the same for an hour or more. Why the difference? After all, they're identical. Scientists have never found any way to explain it, or predict when this decay will occur.

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE way happenstance governs so much of human existence. Never underestimate how being in a certain place at a certain time changes the entire trajectory of things for you. Never underestimate the way we are all hostages to life's random rhythms.

Fate is bound up in the music of chance.

Complex systems are not really random in the same way that a coin toss is random, but in practice it's extremely difficult to tell the difference.

Real life seems to have no plots.

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing.

Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

Almost all life depends on probabilities.

makes us no promises, no guarantees. Things move toward us whether we want them or not. Accidents occur, illnesses strike, and bombs fall. One street can be pulverized, the next one over not even scratched. Chance is so shifty and arbitrary.

When someone asks you about a coin they flipped four times, there is a correct answer: "I'm not sure.