What does randomness look like?
empiricalzeal.com
What does randomness look like?
1–10 of 123 posts
Re: What does randomness look like?
#2I would love to see more like this on HN.
Re: What does randomness look like?
#3"The one on the left, with the clumps, strands, voids, and filaments is the array that was plotted at random, like stars."
Are stars really plotted at random?
Re: What does randomness look like?
#4I would love to see more like this on HN.
The author is @aatishb (https://twitter.com/aatishb) on Twitter. I've followed him for some time and he's a enjoyable science/math blogger if you're interested in that.
Re: What does randomness look like?
#5"The one on the left, with the clumps, strands, voids, and filaments is the array that was plotted at random, like stars." Are stars really plotted at random?
That's a good question. There's obviously more stars in the directions of the galactic plane (what we observe as the Milky Way), but the individual stars that we see in the night sky tend to only be the ones that are really close to us (relatively speaking). So it's a question of which effect dominates the other. I think it'd be interesting to see how well the distribution of stars fits a Poisson distribution.
Re: What does randomness look like?
#6Re: What does randomness look like?
#7Were the bombs actually mostly random?
Re: What does randomness look like?
#8Were the bombs actually mostly random?
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Re: What does randomness look like?
#9Very interesting! So, the basic point being made is that if you know that a set of events are random and independent and you know their mean value, then you can predict their spread? (or aggregation)
edit: Hmm...another question that comes to mind: is the converse true? If the spread of values of these events do not match the poisson distribution, then can we presume them to be nonrandom? Or nonindependent? Or both?
Re: What does randomness look like?
#10This is exactly how they determine species distributions in ecology as well - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_distribution
Uniform dispersion would suggest some territoriality aspect of the species, and clumped dispersion would suggest a heterogeneity of resources (or any other hypothesis that could then be tested).