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[TwoCatSam]

Bayes

Will Rogers, Oklahoma's favorite son, made this statement:  Everyone is ignorant, just on different subjects.  I am ignorant as to how to perform brain surgery!  I am not offended.  Stupid offends me.  [smiley]aes/devil.png[/smiley]

It seems this argument is academic; no place for a Redneck like me!!  I'll just call it random and do my thing.

Some days my thing works very, very well!!

Sam

[Dane]

Sam,


No, that's not at all what I meant. I'm using "ignorance" simply to mean that you don't have knowledge of why an event occurs (nothing to do with not being educated in the wider sense, and it's certainly wasn't meant to be derogatory).


So I'm saying that when you say that something is "random", this SHOULD say something about your knowledge (or lack of it), rather than the event itself. It's simply a shorthand way of admitting that you don't know. You don't know which slot the ball will land in, or whether the coin will land heads or tails up, so you say it's "random". On the other hand, some think that this is far too subjective (and it implies that "everything is relative"); they want "randomness" to be an objective thing because it's more "scientific" (but it isn't, it just seems that way until you look at it carefully).


Now you might be impatient with this and say it's just a silly argument about semantics. As you point out, if it's not possible to know all the variables then you might just as well go ahead and call it "random" for all practical purposes. It might seem like philosophical nit-picking, but it does have practical consequences in the field of statistics. There is a very long running and bitter argument between scientists and philosophers about what probability actually means (and this is closely connected to what "random" means). One view (which has been the dominant one in the 20th century, but is now starting to give way to the alternative interpretation) says that probability is just the long-run measurement of frequencies, and leads to statistical techniques which are almost impossible to understand and don't make much sense. Unfortunately this methodology has been forced on students for the last 60-80 years, which is why pretty much everyone hates the subject.

Still, the basic mathematical laws of probability are the same for both views (as mentioned in the Wiki article).

I am sure that you know this: "Everything is relative" did NOT come from Einstein.
As a true "Dylananiac" I quoted something from Desolation Row. I read somewhere that Bob Dylan was inspired by an old cartoon drawing showing Einstein and the Danish Niels Bohr disguised as Robin Hood and the monk.
Many people know Einstein´s statement from a heated discussion with Bohr: "GOD DOES NOT PLAY DICE". Bohr answered that we should not interfere with what God might or might not do. At least this is what I have heard.
Maybe the gods or the Laws of Nature do not permit gamblers to grow into Heaven?
Some utopian gurus maintained, that we ought to contact GUF ("Grand Unified Field" in Quantum Machanics) and experience the deepest level through meditation and live in accordance with all the Laws of Nature.  Sooner of later we´ll have enough of such statements and might  prefer an ironic approach. So I once wrote a short story (in Danish) to a local chess magazine. In my story a mad professor had found out, that the Universe is like a chess board. 

[esoito]

Time to look at application to betting before everyone falls asleep!


1  Consider this interesting quote:


However quantum physics gives us a strategy that, in a sense, guarantees we will win every single time...If we act based on the outcome of a random quantum event then there is an alternate reality in which we make each possible choice.  The difference between a classical random number generator (e.g., coin-flipping) and a quantum random number generator is that the former is fundamentally deterministic.  I.e., there is no reason to believe that when a coin comes up tails there is an alternate universe in which at the same moment it came up heads.  In contrast, an unbiased quantum flip truly does come up both heads and tails in "alternate realities."
I think the world would be a better place if I had a lot more money under my control.  So I will select 28 random qubits and spend $1 to play PowerBall.  I know that at the end of the game there exists exactly one reality in which I am an instant multimillionaire.  Granted, that is one of only 146MM alternate realities.  But if I don't undertake this exercise I would expect exactly zero realities in which I am much richer next week.
If we incorporated random qubits into our large-scale activity, instead of waiting for the effects of quantum probabilities to ooze up from the atomic level, the "multiverse" would be a much more diverse place!
[http://federalist.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/win-at-gambling-using-quantum-physics/]


And this:

2   http://www.randomnumbers.info/content/Generating.htm


Plus physicists have already built a quantum gambling machine. [An answer to RNG 'fiddling'...perhaps...??]

3  http://phys.org/news128773803.html