The Interpretation of Randomness

How much do you know about randomness? What does it mean by a random process? Well, a lot of people would say that a random process is a process whose outcomes cannot be predicted. Clean and simple, and nice for a lot of people.

But this definition is quite vague to mathematician. Mathematicians have something for preciseness. When you say a circle is round, they would ask how round, and you would not know how to reply to them. But if you ask a mathematician how round is a circle, the answer would be 3.14 x R x R where R is the radius.

Likewise, the above definition for a random process is not precise enough. For mathematician, there are at least two interpretation for a random process:

(i) Frequency interpretation: A process is said to be able to generate random numbers when the observed outcome conform to the underlying probability.

(ii) Subjective interpretation: Observed outcomes are said to be random if they cannot be predicted.



A perfect dice creates random numbers from 1 to 6 according to the former interpretation since, in a long run, the outcomes would be each of the numbers (i.e., 1 to 6) with probability 1/6. However, since the outcomes are predictable, they are not random by the latter definition.


On the other hand, a real dice is not perfect. The probability at which a dice would land on each side is not 1 in 6. It may take millions or billions of observation. But finally, you will observe that one side would be more favorable than the others. As a result, throwing a real dice is not random by the former definition. But it is by the latter, since the outcomes are not predictable.

Source: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, Chapter 3 [Read the Book Review] [Read the Previous Part] [Read the Next Part].

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.


About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.