April 1st, 2007, 3:54 pm
quartz said:topics expressable through an english alphabetYou just put your finger on something here ... some threads remind me of Grant Morrison's "The Invisibles" ... remarkable characters, ideas impossible to express through the 26-letter alphabet, and the sense that the author is writing in a way (through his choice of images, metaphors and style) that makes sense only to him; so without having:(a) experienced what he has experienced and(b) attributed the same meanings to words and imagesone just feels dazzled and confused.N said:Then what's the chance that your truly random numbers leave a specific part of the payoff unvisited ? This isn't a joke at all. It's a good question. If the ring generates only truely random numbers, the chance of leaving a part of the payoff unvisited is 100% irrespective of the number of random numbers used. Payoff functions aren't trivial as your story may suggest.True randomness betrays all.I tried to wrap an idea on a joke; the idea was that true randomness happens, but when you are building a model of the world, you'll sometimes need to model randomness. Now, "model randomness" sounds ugly, but that's what you'll need to do if you want a model to work (if it works well or not it's another matter); you could model randomness in a gaussian way or not, you could buy RAND's "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates", but you need to know what do you expect from your source of randomness and what do you expect from your model.If your goals are not that ambitious, and your model is really a toy model (we're not discussing physics here after all), some (pseudo/quasi-)randomness models may be more convenient to use than others.