Random numbers - Making fair decisions July 20, 2007
Posted by nbeyond in : science, speculation - extreme , trackbackWhen I first heard about creating random numbers in one of the courses in math department many years ago, I could see some passion from the professor explaining about.
What’s so fascinating about generating random numbers? He must be acting….
This is exactly what I thought back then. Random numbers are random numbers. Just computer generated. As the course went on, I started to see the power of creating random numbers if we can create so many in a very short time. This may sound very strange though. This is somewhat true if you think this way.
Flipping a coin is exactly same to create random numbers. The question is how fast you can flip the coin.
If you think each random number as each individual like a human, creating so many random numbers in a short time can mean we can create so many individuals that live their own lives in a very short time. In other words, so many generation simulation in a very short time. Just imagine thousands of generations and how the generation changes generation by generation. This is undoable in reality because time goes so slow and we live very short time but very much doable if we make random numbers individual-like and have a power to create so many random numbers in a short time using computers.
What for?
A random number is a random number not a human. How can you think like that?
Yes, it is a number. Just think about why we flip a coin? Maybe to be fair! Why should it be fair? The meaning of FAIR is attached to decision makings. Could somebody just make some fair decisions for us? Yes, we flip a coin to have fair decisions so that we can settle on whatever issues of our interests. Creating random numbers is making fair decisions if we can. Yes, we can create so many of almost (I say almost) FAIR decisions in a very short time with a help of computers. I’ll continue this post with What kind of world, then, must these individuals (random numbers) live?
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Hi,
(sorry my english)
Most likely you will end up saying ¿why to me?
Today I just did a funny exercise with my colleagues, I asked them to give me random numbers from 1 to 10: 5, 7, 3, 3, 4 … no one said 5, 8869 or 8 & 10/4th … just plain numbers. After I make them notice that everyone said plain numbers they complained that I wasn’t specific enough, ¿does random need specifications?.
Look at your hand, 5 finger, why 5? why not all of them of the same size? why not facing in the same direction? (I can go on and on with nature random). Somehow I realized that random is a gift that nature did not give us, actually we hate random, we like to know if its going to rain, at what time the bus will come, will the flight be on schedule, the side the coin is going to flip.
So, I wrote “can humans create random numbers” in Google, yours is the first link, to you I write.
Cheers!
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Christian. I agree that we can not create true random numbers unless we know all the cases of possibility that includes future in the universe. However, with a big enough number of cases that these days’ computers allow, we can create (hopefully) nearly random numbers and use them to understand or reproduce our observation of the nature.
Cheers,
Good post.