Re: Probability and apologetics
Bill Hamilton (hamilton@predator.cs.gmr.com)
Thu, 31 Aug 1995 08:43:39 -0500Glenn's post on probability arguments reminds me: In the 22 July issue of
_New Scientist_, pp38-42 is an article called "It's a lottery". It's an
excellent exposition of the various misconceptions people have about
randomness. One of the interesting points the article makes is that if you
ask most people to write down a string of random numbers, the strings they
concoct will be very deficient in substrings like 111, 123, 2468, etc.,
because such strings don't "look random". But a true random number
generator doesn't have a memory, and so could not (and should not) exclude
such strings. I highly recommend it.
Bill Hamilton | Vehicle Systems Research
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