What Is Randomness And How It Works

0
581
Image source: Wikipedia

Humans being crippled and blessed with curiosity have fascinating minds that help them go beyond the known and find more about the unknown. Humans are naturally seekers that want to find answers to everything they see around them.

A very old mystery about our world revolves around the idea of randomness, chance, and destiny. Even though it is more of a philosophical concept, it has a lot of applications and uses in real life that have and continue to bother a lot of scientists and truth seekers.

For example, the use of otp or one time password given by the best otp service providers in India and in other countries use randomly generated strings of numbers or characters for transactions and safe trading of money.

Randomness in these cases is the key that keeps the idea of safety intact while using the web for important transactions, accessing information or other purposes.

IT ALL STARTS WITH A DICE ROLL

If one wants to understand the concept of randomness and probability, the best example to be used is a dice roll that is a part of many board games, and more or less everyone has tried it at least once.

A fair dice has six numbers printed on six different faces with an equal chance of being upturned when the dice is rolled. So in the case of a dice roll, we see that when a dice is rolled or the main event occurs, one out of the available six options can be seen to happen.

This is called fair play only when we know that the dice is unbiased which means that every number can come out to be seen after the dice roll with equal chance. The theoretical way to check this is to somehow imagine doing a number of dice rolls say about ten thousand and see that every number came to be upturned an equal number of times.

Another example of this is using a deck of cards. People who play games with cards know that it is extremely rare to get three aces in a row and that is exactly why three aces always win. It is equally difficult to get three kings or three queens in a row if we follow the same logic.

It is called as gambling as there is no way to know which person would end up with which cards because unlike in the case of a single dice roll, the sample space or the group of all possible outcomes with a deck of 52 cards is very high.

Still, mathematicians theoretically know the result of a dice roll or in a game of cards. Practically, there are very few theories to tell us what happens in a situation with more than one possible outcome and it becomes even more tricky if there are more than one variables involved.

RANDOMNESS AND THE REAL WORLD

The modern theories in physics tell us that our world on a very small scale or atomic dimensions, is a world that works on randomness.

Today, scientists have evidence to prove that in the case of an atom, unlike the earlier concept of an electron revolving around the nucleus in an orbit, we now say that the electron is actually present everywhere on its orbit around the nucleus.

Just before an observation is made on the electron’s position, its position actually becomes the one we observe it in. In quantum physics, this is called the wave function collapse. Science fiction exploits this theory but sadly, we have no evidence that it happens at larger scales than the atomic dimensions.

CONCLUSION

Randomness is a concept that not many people are comfortable with, especially in the case of an outlook towards life. Randomness has various applications in our world today like otp generation given by the best otp service providers in India, the real nature of light, uses in artificial intelligence and machine learning, etc.

The idea of randomness or a matter of chance vs. destiny in real life troubles various philosophers and even many scientists. The human mind naturally understands the idea of linearity and predictability as that is how our ego likes it. It wants to make us believe that we know everything and we can predict everything.

Enlightened people and masters often talk about chance and how it is also a part of our lives. Once a person transcends their mental limitations put upon us by our ego and looks beyond the logic, one may accept the real way of nature that is a mixture of both predictability and randomness.