randomness

a student is asked to toss a coin 100 times and write down the results if the toss turned up a head or a tail in the sequence it appeared. he is then asked to write another sequence of 100 coin toss BUT without tossing the coins AND which he thinks is a random sequence. he was then asked to submit both results to the teacher for analysis.

the teacher was able to tell which set of results was with the coin toss and which one was generated by the student even though the results din have any indication which set they belonged to.

how was this possible?

it is said that the trained eye is able to tell if a random event has occurred. now the thing that i am curious about is this: if an event is random yet a trained eye can point out if it was generated or random because the event follows a set of rules, can the event be considered to be random in the first place.

before i confuse you people further, i will explain what this set of rules is. for the coin toss, if you were take the runs of heads (a run being the number of times the head comes up continuously in a series of tosses, therefore HHH would represent a run of 3 heads and H would represent a run of 1 head and so forth), and plot it against the number of times the runs appear, the plot would fit a curve. the more the number of tosses, the better fit the curve.

now that we've gotten that out of the way, do u start to wonder, how a random event, such as a coin toss can have a determined set of results? its like you're able to predict the future for something that can go either way literally.

if randomness can really be pointed out and it has a set of rules, can it be called random anymore? it doesnt follow our defination of being random anymore.

or is our mindset limited such that we arent able to see a bigger picture that laid out before us?

Tariq :: email ::
|6:23 pm|
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