On Sun, 20 Sep 1998, clark wrote:
> It seems to me that it strains credulity to insist that we have a
> predictable universe sitting on top of a completely random process. Where
> have I gone wrong in my reasoning?
i see your point, and i'm reminded of this: the game is to look at a
collection of computer generated random numbers from 1 to 100. if you
look at one random number, it appears to be random. if you look at a
collection of a thousand numbers, the numbers still appear to be random,
although patterns begin to develop as far as frequency of each number. by
the time you are looking at a thousand collections of a thousand random
numbers, you have a very predictable universe sitting on top of a
completely random process.
the reasoning behind clark's dubiousness isn't at all faulty. it is
theoretically possible for a computer to generate a million random numbers
between one and 100 and never generate a 57, say. but you can depend on a
57 almost as much as you can depend on Walmart being in the same place
tomorrow.
homepage - http://www.moq.org
queries - mailto:moq@moq.org
unsubscribe - mailto:majordomo@moq.org with UNSUBSCRIBE MOQ_DISCUSS in
body of email
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:34 BST