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Verifying Randomness

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Thursday, 12 August 2010, at 3:13 a.m.

In Response To: Verifying Randomness (Marv Porten)

Marv Porten wrote:

Is there a way of proving that the numbers on the dice are NOT random?

Dilbert was taking a tour of the accounting department. "Over here we have our random number generator." A demon is sitting there saying, "Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine." Dilbert: "Are you sure that's random?" Answer: "That's the problem with randomness. You can never be sure."

Depending on what you mean by 'prove,' there may not be any way to prove anything one way or the other. However, what you can do is to try various statistical tests and show, for some particular test, that the probability of seeing what you see would be extremely small if the dice were random. You can regard this as evidence that the dice are not random. If you try many such tests and none of them produces evidence of this sort, then you could consider that to be evidence that the dice are random. But it's really lack of evidence that the dice are not random rather than proof that the dice are random.

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