[NBLUG/talk] Request for help--how to program shuffling

[Andru Luvisi]

On Wed, 21 May 2003, Steve Zimmerman wrote:
[snip]
> I.e., random means "without order"
> as atonality means "without tone."
[snip]

Random does not mean "without order".

There have been several attempts at a formal definition (again, see
Knuth), but I tend to think of random as meaning:

  Before the event occurs you do not know what will happen

It is also useful in many contexts to include:

  Before the event occurs, you know what the probability of each possible
  outcome is.

There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a random order, a random
selection, a random number.  Once you have picked a number it is not
random any more.  What we normally mean when we speak of "a random number"
is "a number chosen randomly".  When we speak of "a random poker hand", we
mean "a poker hand chosen randomly", which is to say that before the poker
hand was chosen, we did not know what it would be, and all poker hands
were equally likely.

It is strange the way the human mind observes patterns.  If you were to
flip a coin 10 times and get heads all 10 times, it might seem highly
unlikely (probability 1/1024).  However, if you were to flip a coin 10
times and get any other combination of heads and tails (say, HHTHTTHHHT),
that pattern would be equally unlikely (probability 1/1024).

For more on probability and gambling, I highly recommend the book "Scarne
on Dice".  He does a good job of explaining how to figure out odds and
probabilities and what they really mean.

Andru
-- 
Andru Luvisi, Programmer/Analyst

Quote Of The Moment:
  Heisenberg may have been here.