random

[Nick Perkins]

"Darren New" <dnew at san.rr.com> wrote:
> how random is the binary string "1001010010011100100"? How random is the
> binary string "0000000000000000000"? Such questions don't make any
> sense.

They do make sense, according to Chaitin.  He says that they are as random
as the shortest program than can produce them.  In this sense, even if the
string of zeros happened to come up at random, it is not actually a random
string.  Most of the numbers produced at random will *be* random, but not
all.  I think he goes on to show that for arbitrarily long random sequences,
the proportion of such 'co-incedences' will approach zero.