Defining Randomness and Probability

Is all life predestined, or is existence blown about by the whims of entropy? If we restarted the universe with the same world generating seed a la Minecraft, would it all play out the same??? These are ginormous questions that we do not get into in this episode! Instead, we're examining slightly more manageable examples of randomness in nature, in computing, and even in ourselves. 

SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! 

Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! A big thank you to Patreon subscriber Garth Riley for helping to make the show possible!

And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!

Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! 

While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen

[The Scientific Definition]

The Lost Boarding Pass Problem

https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/23162

The Secretary Problem

https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~ted/210F10/References/Secretary.pdf

https://slate.com/technology/2014/12/the-secretary-problem-use-this-algorithm-to-determine-exactly-how-many-people-you-should-assess-before-making-a-new-hire-or-choosing-a-life-partner.html

The Sleeping Beauty Problem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW27QJYNXtU

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-sleeping-beauty-problem-is-keeping-mathematicians-awake/

[Trivia Question]

Sum of numbers on a D120 vertex where 10 faces meet

https://www.wired.com/2016/05/mathematical-challenge-of-designing-the-worlds-most-complex-120-sided-dice/

[Fact Off]

Fastest computer worm in history was the random-scanning worm called Slammer (aka the Sapphire Worm) 

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/IEEESP03.pdf

https://www.science.org/content/article/fastest-worm-ever

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1523881

Effectiveness of randomly promoting employees in a business instead of promoting by merit

[Ask the Science Couch]

Humans are (maybe) bad at intuitively understanding or predicting randomness

https://cocosci.princeton.edu/tom/papers/hard.pdf

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5215234/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5933241/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027717302895

https://zhaolab.psych.ubc.ca/pdfs/Zhao_2014_JEPHPP.pdf

Patreon bonus: pseudorandom number generators and randomization seeds

https://www.random.org/randomness/

https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/pseudorandom_number_generator

https://www.acsac.org/2003/papers/79.pdf

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/

[Butt One More Thing]

Dung beetles that attach themselves to butts to find poop non-randomly

https://www.sfzoo.org/dung-beetle/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19169550/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.