The Random Thread.

Jono96 · 2006-02-23 17:09:26

Anything random to say? tell us!

#2 23-02-2006 06:11PM

Jono96

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heineken and marshmello's are a good combination...............
try it.....

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#3 23-02-2006 06:27PM

**Timbuk2**

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Billy Bob Billy Joe Billy Hey Billy Hoe

Once a whore, always a whore

:v:

:eek:zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

'Visual Basic.NET

public sub random

dim randomGenerator as system.random(1, 11)
dim randomNumber as integer

randomNumber = randomGenerator.next

MessageBox.show("The random number is " & randomNumber & ".", "RANDOM", MessageBoxButtons.OkOnly, MessageBoxIcons.Exclamation, False)

end sub

[php]
void main(void)
{
int i;
int input;
cout << "Please enter a number from 1 To 10"; << endl;
cin >> input;
if (input == 7)
{
MessageBox::Show("You entered 7")
}
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
cout << i + " sheep" << endl;
}
}
[/php]
[html]
<html>
<head><title>THIS IS RANDOM</title></head>
<body>
RND
</body>
</html>
[/html]
That was random and so is
YOUR MOTHER

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#4 24-02-2006 12:24PM

KnifeWRENCH

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randomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandomrandom

as you can see,i have no life

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#5 01-03-2006 10:16PM

Capt'n Midnight

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Random Facts Link

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#6 01-03-2006 11:05PM

scojones

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Jono96 wrote:

heineken and marshmello's are a good combination...............
try it.....

Skittles and vodka is nicer.

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#7 01-03-2006 11:06PM

scojones

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#!/bin/sh
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp;

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#8 01-03-2006 11:12PM

scojones

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The word random is used to express apparent lack of purpose, cause, or order. The term randomness is often used synonymously with a number of measurable statistical properties, such as lack of bias or correlation.

Randomness has an important place in science and philosophy.

History

Humankind has been concerned with randomness since prehistoric times, mostly through divination (reading messages in random patterns) and gambling. The opposition between free will and determinism has been a divisive issue in philosophy and theology.

Despite the prevalence of gambling in all times and cultures, for a long time there was little western inquiry into the subject, possibly due to the Church's disapproval of gambling and divination. Though Gerolamo Cardano and Galileo have written about games of chance, it was work by Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fermat and Christiaan Huygens that led to what is today known as probability theory.

Mathematicians focused at first on statistical randomness and considered block frequencies (that is, not only the frequencies of occurrences of individual elements, but also those of blocks of arbitrary length) as the measure of randomness, an approach that extended into the use of information entropy in information theory.

In the early 1960s Gregory Chaitin, Andrey Kolmogorov and Ray Solomonoff introduced the notion of algorithmic randomness, in which the randomness of a sequence depends on whether it is possible to compress it.

Randomness in science

Many scientific fields are concerned with randomness:

* Algorithmic probability
* Chaos theory
* Cryptography
* Game theory
* Information theory
* Pattern recognition
* Probability theory
* Quantum mechanics
* Statistics
* Statistical mechanics

In the physical sciences

Traditionally, randomness takes on an operational meaning in natural science: something is apparently random if its cause cannot be determined or controlled. When an experiment is performed and all the control variables are fixed, the remaining variation is ascribed to uncontrolled (ie, 'random') influences. The assumption, again, is that if it were somehow possible to perfectly control all influences, the result of the experiment would be always the same. Therefore, for much of the history of science, randomness has been interpreted in one way or another as ignorance on the part of the observer. That changed in the 19th century with the discovery of statistical mechanics, which explained known laws of thermodynamics and the properties of gases in terms of the random motion of molecules. The discovery of radioactivity, near the turn of the 20th century, presented another phenomenon that was most simply explained by randomness.

With the advent of quantum mechanics, it appears that the world is irreducibly random. According to the standard interpretations of the theory, it is possible to set up an experiment with total control of all relevant parameters, which will still have a perfectly random outcome. Indeed, quantum mechanics does not predict the outcome of experiments, but only their probability distribution. Minority resistance to this idea takes the form of hidden variable theories in which the outcome of the experiment is determined by certain unobservable characteristics (hence the name "hidden variables"). The very existence of important classes of hidden variables would produce experimentally testable difference from what standard quantum mechanics predicts. See Bell test experiments.

Many physical processes resulting from quantum-mechanical effects are, therefore, believed to be irreducibly random. Perhaps the best-known example is the timing of radioactive decay events in radioactive substances. Even the large-scale structure of the cosmos is currently explained as resulting from quantum mechanical fluctuations that occurred shortly after the big bang.

In mathematics

The mathematical theory of probability arose from attempts to formulate mathematical descriptions of chance events, originally in the context of gambling but soon in connection with situations of interest in physics. Statistics is used to infer the underlying probability distribution of a collection of empirical observations. For the purposes of simulation it is necessary to have a large supply of random numbers, or means to generate them on demand.

Algorithmic information theory studies, among other topics, what constitutes a random sequence. The central idea is that a string of bits is random if and only if it is shorter than any computer program that can produce that string (Chaitin-Kolmogorov randomness) - this basically means that random strings are those that cannot be compressed. Pioneers of this field include Andrey Kolmogorov, Ray Solomonoff, Gregory Chaitin, Anders Martin-Löf, and others.

In communication theory

Successful communication in the real world depends, at the limit, on understanding and successfully minimizing the deleterious effects of assorted interference sources, many of which are apparently random. Such noise imposes performance limits on any communications channel and it was the study of those limits which led Shannon to develop information theory, make fundamental contributions to communication theory, and establish a theoretical grounding for cryptography.

In finance

The random walk hypothesis considers that asset prices in an organized market evolve at random.

Randomness in philosophy and religion

Note that the bias that "everything has a purpose or cause" is actually implicit in the expression "apparent lack of purpose or cause". Humans are always looking for patterns in their experience, and the most basic pattern seems to be cause/effect. This appears to be deeply embedded in the human brain, and perhaps in other animals as well. For example, dogs and cats often have been reported to have apparently made a cause and effect connection that strikes us as amusing or peculiar. (See classical conditioning.) For instance there is a report of a dog who, after a visit to a vet whose clinic had tile floors of a particular kind, refused thereafter to go near such a tiled floor, whether or not it was at a vet's.

It is because of this bias that the absence of a cause seems problematic. See causality.

To solve this problem, random events are sometimes said to be caused by chance. Rather than solving the problem of randomness, this opens the gaping hole of defining chance. It is hard to avoid circularity by defining chance in terms

Randomness versus unpredictability

Some argue randomness should not be confused with practical unpredictability, which is a related idea in ordinary usage. Some mathematical systems, for example, could be seen as random; however they are actually unpredictable. This is due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions (see chaos theory). Many random phenomena may exhibit organized features at some levels. For example, while the average rate of increase in the human population is quite predictable, in the short term, the actual timing of individual births and deaths cannot be predicted. This small-scale randomness is found in almost all real-world systems. Ohm's law and the kinetic theory of gases are statistically reliable descriptions of the 'sum' (i.e. the net result or integration) of vast numbers of individual micro events, each of which are random, and none of which are individually predictable. All we directly perceive is circuit noise and some bulk gas behaviors.

Chaotic systems are unpredictable in practice due to their extreme dependence on initial conditions. Whether or not they are unpredictable in terms of computability theory is a subject of current research. At least in some disciplines computability theory the notion of randomness turns out to be identified with computational unpredictability.

Unpredictability is required in some applications, such as the many uses of random numbers in cryptography. In other applications (e.g. modeling or simulation) statistical randomness is essential, but predictability is also helpful (for instance, when repeatedly running simulations or acceptance tests, it can be useful to be able to rerun the model with the exact same random input several times).

Sensibly dealing with randomness is a hard problem in modern science, mathematics, psychology and philosophy. Merely defining it adequately, for the purposes of one discipline has proven quite difficult. Distinguishing between apparent randomness and actual randomness has been no easier. In addition, assuring unpredictability, especially against a well-motivated party (in cryptographic parlance, the "adversary"), has been harder still.

Some philosophers have argued that there is no randomness in the universe, only unpredictability. Others find the distinction meaningless (see determinism for more information).

Randomness and religion

Some theologians have attempted to resolve the apparent contradiction between

Applications and use of randomness

Main article: Applications of randomness

Random numbers were first investigated in the context of gambling, and many randomizing devices such as dice, shuffling playing cards, and roulette wheels, were first developed for use in gambling. Fairly produced random numbers are vital to electronic gambling and ways of creating them are sometimes regulated by governmental gaming commissions.

Random numbers are also used for non-gambling purposes, both where their use is mathematically important, such as sampling for opinion polls, and in situations where "fairness" is approximated by randomization, such as selecting jurors and military draft lotteries. Computational solutions for some types of problems use random numbers extensively, such as in the Monte Carlo method and in genetic algorithms.

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#9 01-03-2006 11:12PM

scojones

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....continued

Generating randomness

Main article: Random number generation

In his book A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram describes three mechanisms responsible for (apparently) random behaviour in systems :

1. Randomness coming from the environment (for example, brownian motion, but also hardware random number generators)
2. Randomness coming from the initial conditions. This aspect is studied by chaos theory, and is observed in systems whose behaviour is very sensitive to small variations in initial conditions (such as pachinko machines, dice ...).
3. Randomness intrinsically generated by the system. This is also called pseudorandomness, and is the kind used in pseudo-random number generators. There are many algorithms (based on arithmetics or cellular automaton) to generate pseudorandom numbers. The behaviour of the system can be determined by knowing the seed state and the algorithm used. This method is quicker than getting "true" randomness from the environment.

The many applications of randomness have led to many different methods for generating random data. These methods may vary as to how unpredictable or statistically random they are, and how quickly they can generate random numbers.

Before the advent of computational random number generators, generating large amount of sufficiently random numbers (important in statistics) required a lot of work. Results would sometimes be collected and distributed as random number tables.

Links related to generating randomness

* Hardware random number generator
* Information entropy
* Probability theory
* Pseudorandomness
* Pseudorandom number generator
* Random number
* Random sequence
* Random variable
* Randomization
* Stochastic process

Misconceptions/logical fallacies

Popular perceptions of randomness are frequently wrong, based on logical fallacies. Following is an attempt to identify the source of such fallacies and correct the logical errors. For a more detailed discussion, see Gambler's Fallacy.

Quotations
* "God doesn't play dice with the universe." —Albert Einstein
* "Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random." —Donald E. Knuth
* "The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance." —Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1969
* "That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art." —John A. Locke
* "I laugh at the predictable and crack the pseudorandom." —Steven Roddis
* "How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?" — Joseph Bertrand, Calcul des probabilités, 1889

[edit]

Books

* Randomness by Deborah J. Bennett. Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN 0674107454
* The Art of Computer Programming. Vol. 2: Seminumerical Algorithms, 3rd ed. by Donald E. Knuth, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. ISBN 0-201-89684-2
* Fooled by Randomness, 2nd Ed. by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Thomson Texere, 2004. ISBN 158799190X

See also

* Aleatory
* Complexity
* Chaos
* Probability interpretations
* Random number generator

Randomness Humour

Randomness humour is where the media text generally lacks any sense of purpose or meaning. It is therefore only, to any great effect, able to be used in Comedy; even so, very little Television humour is of the Randomness genre. This is mainly due to the fact that this humour can only work with a particular focus, something T.V. can't do, nor would risk doing as it is a small market and a 30-minute slot better used. An example of this would be Macromedia Flash cartoons on the Internet. These are not restricted to a niche market as the niche market is there market. They also aren't restricted by Copyright and so can use themes such as the animator's favourite T.V. show, videogame or general thing they felt enough people know about to understand the humour of it.

What this basically means is a Flash animation based on Randomness humour will be on one thing in particular. Example of this would be Metal Gear Awesome -requires link- by Egoraptor. This Flash Animation is a random take on the Metal Gear Solid series by Konami. The cartoon deals with Snakes latest mission to once again stop Metal Gear, as per usual in the games, and also contains many in-jokes, such as Snake fobbing off to Colonel that the guy he shot actually suffered a heart attack and did not get shot. Also, due to the extreme lack of seriousness the characters can do extraordinary things when deemed appropriate, like when snake tell Liquid to shut-up and shoot Colonel he actually moves out of the portrait hes in and physically interacts with them, despite actually being far away from them, this is purely for Comic Relief and is another example of Randomness humour.

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#10 01-03-2006 11:13PM

scojones

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

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#11 02-03-2006 12:29AM

arbeitsscheuer

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I went to see a Psychoanalyst yesterday.

He was baffled and bemused because I'm jovial and ebullient... More fool him, I'm just a master of disguise...

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#12 04-03-2006 11:18PM

**Timbuk2**

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Random is used in computer terms as well

Memory in a computer, which is measured in RAM (Random access memory), has alot to determine the speed of the computer.

There are different types of RAM such as DDRAM and SDRAM, but they all have RANDOM in them

www.random.org

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#13 04-03-2006 11:29PM

Scraggs

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I have small hands and really skinny wrists

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#14 04-03-2006 11:34PM

arbeitsscheuer

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awww. Cute.

blarg. Wow, a thread I could write absolutely anything in...

...

...

It's cold and boring, I'm going back to the regular forums!

/runs off

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#15 04-03-2006 11:49PM

Scraggs

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Seb is boring and isnt random enough...

Actually now that i think of it I had quite a random encounter with seb last week...I was walking in through college doors and i could see a reflection in the glass I couldnt see my own which was weird but yet i recognised the other reflection.. I held the door open as the mysterious reflection walked through and it turned out to be him.. so i said in my meek little voice 'seb? are you seb?' [it was him btw]
How random was that?
Anyway onto more random topics?
I cant decide whether to wear a red waist/corsety type belt or a normal blue belt to work tomorrow...

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#16 05-03-2006 12:09AM

**Timbuk2**

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Guess what numbers are going to win the Euromillions this week?

4 8 15 16 23 42
They seem familiar from somewhere :rolleyes:

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#17 05-03-2006 12:13AM

Scraggs

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Lost Pwns Teh Intrenot

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#18 05-03-2006 12:19AM

Scraggs

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If it was up to you would you push the button every 108 minutes?

I dont think I would... I'd wanna see what'd happen plus if the universe ended i'd be dead too so it wouldnt really matter!

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#19 05-03-2006 12:38AM

**Timbuk2**

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I wish Jack did not push the button cos then we wouldn't have to wait another 3 series to see what happens if he doesn't

Tell ya also something cool I found out

4+8+15+16+23+42=108:eek:

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#20 05-03-2006 12:38AM

Scraggs

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cool hadnt heard that before...

would you push it?

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#21 05-03-2006 12:41AM

**Timbuk2**

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Probably yeah... I'd be afraid that the hatch would blow up and there would be bits of toilet flying all over the place, which would kill you in the end

Brief glance of my keyboard, EXECUTE button is missing :eek:

Were all dead :eek::eek:

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#22 05-03-2006 12:46AM

Scraggs

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yeah but you'd prob be dead so would it matter...

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#23 05-03-2006 12:50AM

**Timbuk2**

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Its the first picture you get when you enter 4 8 15 16 23 42 into http://images.google.com

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#24 05-03-2006 01:07AM

arbeitsscheuer

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oh my god Lost... A virus on the internet, almost as bad an epidemic as BEBO, and almost as deserving of OTT response such as the random culling of people who post on it. Not to mention the fact that Lost has its own forum, so sod off and quibble over insignificant details of a fantastical tv-show with your own 'people'.

/end rant

Yeah, had a close encounter of the Scraggs kind last week.

Was pleasantly impressed.

Nuff said.

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#25 05-03-2006 01:10AM

Chinafoot

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I have popcorn bits stuck in my teeth

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#26 05-03-2006 01:11AM

arbeitsscheuer

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Get someone to suck them out.

You could make a game of it.

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#27 05-03-2006 01:12AM

**Timbuk2**

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<ignore>http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=50987531&postcount=24</ignore>

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#28 05-03-2006 01:30AM

delly

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I managed to bang the dent back in, but i'll still have to get some touch up paint for the scrapes. Damn poll.

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#29 05-03-2006 02:48AM

Scraggs

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as I was undressing for bed a two euro coin fell out of my top!! now thats random!!!

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#30 05-03-2006 02:53AM

The Gnome

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The Antelope has no agenda, beware...

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#31 05-03-2006 02:54AM

arbeitsscheuer

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The antelope always has an agenda, you fool... You must be wearing blinkers, if you think otherwise...

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