Randomness

Randomness is a concept with somewhat disparate meanings in several fields. It used to denote a lack of order, or purpose, or cause. Randomness is the sense of lack of predictability


Randomness, is the situation when a choice is to be made which has no logical component by which to determine or make the choice.

by Aristotle

Despite the prevalence of gambling in all times and cultures, for a long time, there was little inquiry into the subject. Randomness, as opposed to unpredictability, is held to be an objective property (determinists believe it is an objective fact that randomness does not in fact exist). Nevertheless, what appears random to one observer may not appear random to another observer. Consider two observers of a sequence of bits, only one of whom has the cryptographic key needed to turn the sequence of bits into a readable message. The message is not random, but is unpredictable for one of the observers.

One of the intriguing aspects of random processes is that it is hard to know whether the process is truly random. The observer can always suspect that there is some "key" that unlocks the message. This is one of the foundations of superstition and is also what is a driving motive, curiosity, for discovery in science and mathematics.

Most of the modern humans are often unaware of the very existence of randomness. They tend to explain random outcomes as non-random. Human beings overestimate causality and tend to view the world as more explainable than it really is, i.e., we look for explanations even when there are none.