Monday, January 31, 2005
What do you think? Is there actually such a thing as random? Or is there a pattern in everything. There's actually a movie called PI (yeah like the number) that deals with this very issue. It also has some drug issues too, but it is one of those artsie flicks. Anyway, so I've gotten Ashley to start playing the lottery. The guy's got a frickin' horse shoe up his butt and I told he needs to start getting something out of it. So after he picked his numbers for Cash 5 on Friday he unknowingly discovered that the previous drawing contained 2 of his current picks and the three other numbers were only one digit off. His point was well taken, "Close doesn't count." The fact is he nearly picked the previous drawing (he didn't know the numbers, trust me) and in time, he's gonna hit it big! I told him I'd help him out some and pick my own Cash 5 numbers so he'd know which ones had no chance of coming up. So, what if the lottery numbers were not "random" but we could figure out the pattern of the balls. It sure looks like a pattern doesn't it? A couple low numbers, followed by a series of two or three. What if we had the big picture? I mean the really big picture. What if we could see the whole universe over its entire lifetime in a single frame? I can't imagine such a thing would be completely random and chaotic. Can you?
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Random is a frame of reference. Your lottery balls for example only behave "randomly" due to lack of information. Theoretically, you should be able to predict the location of each ball at any moment of time because the laws of physics are hard an fast in this case. If you had a way to measure each individual force on each lottery ball, each ball's initial location, and the time at which each ball is removed from the machine (as well as countless other variables), you could theoretically develop a system of differential equations that could accurately predict the number on each ball drawn as well as their order. However, this is horrendously complicated and impossible to do at the speed which the balls interact with each other and the lottery machine. Therefore, it is practically random in that no one can consistently predict the lottery numbers.
Oh, and tell Ashley to quit playing the lottery. He'd be better off putting the money in a Dividend Reinvestment Plan. He'll get better returns that way, and he can put his "luck" to work in picking which one to invest with.
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