Contemplating randomness… it may come as a bit of a surprise, but the idea of “random” is a troubling one, not as easy to pin down as one may expect.

This comes on the heels of my obsession with lotteries.

There is a bit of an addiction to the Law of Large Numbers, when it comes with trying to explain things.

Knowing the above is important because if one looks at the history of MegaMillions and PowerBall draws, one may think the numbers drawn are not random. Indeed, there are plenty of websites out there that try to convince people that the draws are not random but fit some sort of pattern (that is predictable, and if you only subscribe to the right service…)

The lotteries look like they are not random because some numbers have come up much more frequently than others, and even more disturbing is that certain pairs of numbers have come up together in a draw much more often than rest of the set of all pairs.

The troubling thing is that there is no way to prove that a lottery draw has to be “random”. By which I do not mean that a game is rigged by the lottery company.

This, btw, is, I suspect, why there are still people who hold hidden variable (or spin-offs thereof such as pilot-wave) beliefs when it comes to quantum mechanics.

We humans, it appears, believe that some event has to be caused by some prior event or events. This is the tact creationists often take when trying to trip up non-creationists.