Quotes About Randomness

Some of it is simply luck.

Truly random data remains spread out in an undefined mess. But chaos-deterministic and patterned-pulls the data into visible shapes. Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

orderly disorder created by simple processes. Truly random data remains spread out in an undefined mess. But chaos—deterministic and patterned—pulls the data into visible shapes. Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

pattern, especially pattern that appeared on different scales at the same time. They had a taste for randomness and complexity, for jagged edges and sudden leaps. Believers in chaos—and they sometimes call themselves believers, or converts, or evangelists—speculate about determinism and free will, about evolution, about the nature of conscious intelligence. They feel that they are turning back a trend in science toward reductionism, the analysis of systems

A bit, fundamentally, is always a coin toss.

Traditionally, when physicists saw complex results, they looked for complex causes. When they saw a random relationship between what goes into a system and what comes out, they assumed that they would have to build randomness into any realistic theory, by artificially adding noise or error.

In physics—or wherever natural processes seem unpredictable—apparent randomness may be noise or may arise from deeply complex dynamics.

Had he stopped with the Butterfly Effect, an image of predictability giving way to pure randomness, then Lorenz would have produced no more than a piece of very bad news. But Lorenz saw more than randomness embedded in his weather model. He saw a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading as randomness.

John Hubbard, exploring iterated functions and the infinite fractal wildness of the Mandelbrot set, considered chaos a poor name for his work, because it implied randomness. To him, the overriding message was that simple processes in nature could produce magnificent edifices of complexity without randomness. In nonlinearity and feedback lay all the necessary tools for encoding and then unfolding structures as rich as the human brain.

Noi suntem inventaÈ›i pe m?sur? ce ne tr?im viaÈ›a, deÈ™i evenimentele aleatorii ale zilelor noastre nu par s? urmeze un curs coerent. Firul narativ iese la iveal? abia la momentul reamintirii. Copil?ria are sens doar când privim retrospectiv. Doar atunci când privim retrospectiv, printre crengile arborelui, vedem realitatea ghindei.

Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption.

'Minecraft' is to a large degree about having unique experiences that nobody else has had. The levels are randomly generated, and you can build anything you want to build yourself.

God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

This randomness makes her feel like vapor, someone inconsequential and invisible.

Perfection is only chance.

Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents

I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics.

And yet.. even if you had been right, it would only have been by accident. A broken clock is right two times a day.

Running was the way he dreamed. Having never been in control of his life, his idea of freedom was simply to break free. He dreamed of being at the mercy of the wind, carried aloft and blown here and there, a life of true randomness instead of always being part of someone else's purpose.

Fate can be appeased, gods prayed to. But chance is just what it says.

Sometimes it amazes me how much these defining parts of our lives hinge on chance.

Another way to describe the Second Law is in terms of entropy, the degree of disorder and randomness in a system. Any spontaneous process tends to increase the entropy of a system.