Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Randomness and God


The random bitmaps are generated using atmospheric noise which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random numbers typically generated by computer programs. Check this out!

The site also has a random coin flipper. Here's an essay on random number generation.

Leads me to think...

Is anything truly random for God, the great Cosmic Being Who ensouls this planet, embodying all the Laws and all the energies governed by those Laws, which make up everything that we see and cannot see?

When you flip a coin, he can take into account the gravity, the viscosity of air, the force with which you flipped the coin, the point on the coin where you applied the force, and all the other factors the affect the outcome of the flipping of a coin. He can then always correctly tell you the outcome of your coin flipping. Similary, whatever be the random event you choose, it will not be random for Him.

Some events we felt were random yesterday, may not be considered random anymore, because today we may be able to model and understand them using computers that are much faster than those yesterday, thanks to Moore's Law. We may thus be able to always correctly predict the outcome of some of the events that we considered random in the past. Today we consider some events as random, but similary, someone may be able to model them and always correctly predict their outcome tomorrow, using faster computers available that day in the future.

A friend of mine says, random is something you can't predict, while randomness is the measure of difficulty in predicting the number. Going by his definition, everything that is random has an infinite difficulty. And anything that has a finite value of difficuly associated with it, isn't random because there's a finite probability that you can correctly predict it.

Thus, what was random yesterday, may not be random today or in the future!

Hence, I have the following question:

Q: Is there an event in this world which is truly random? So random that even God can't predict its outcome for sure?