Talk:1210: I'm So Random

"Random"

Are the numbers in the speech bubble truely random (as in is there a real pattern)? Can someone check? --Charlesisbozo (talk) 08:54, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

I was wondering that myself. I did a quick tally of the digits and for 0..9 I have frequencies of {24,9,18,18,14,17,14,8,9,14} respectively for the readily identifiable digits (YMMV, and while I counted the probable 5 behind Hairy's left ear, I didn't count the possible five behind his left knee, for example.) It doesn't seem to have fallen for the "too many 3s and 7s" trap, nor "too few 3s and 7s, because I know I'll pick them if I try to be random" one, because one is 'high' and one is 'low'. Ditto the "avoiding zero and using nine a lot", says I, vaguely half remembering something from the New Scientists a decade or two ago... While it's not a flat distribution, I'd also suspect it as 'constructed' if it was nearly equal tallies. Someone else can probably tell me if this sample of 145 is within variation limits but I'm still going on intuition.

What I was originally going to do is also go so far as to compare neighbours-on-neighbours. It appeared to me that there were two many like-like neighbours. It's not as easy as in if a grid-system (without holes, etc), but I trivially count a couple of dozen (probably more) and even some 'triples' and that 'stripe' of zeros (from top down to his right knee) is interesting.

That's a sign that it probably is random. Over 100 digits, let's say average 5 neighbours (in a hex grid the internal ones would each have 6 but the ones on the edge fewer), there must be close to 300 or more pairs of neighbours. One-tenth of those would be identical. Truly random sequences have far more identical neighbours than sequences that seem random to us. MGK (talk) 10:44, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Preliminarily, I choose to believe that Randall used a PRNG or even a noise source and stuck to it (even when patterns may have become apparent). Also that, on examining the image closely, he pasted Hairy's anti-aliased image over the top of the numbers then did a little extra editing. ;) 178.98.253.89 10:24, 10 May 2013 (UTC)