Eddie Wu

But one of the things that's most amazing in the study of randomness is that randomness cannot help but give rise to appearance of order.

So for example, if you didn't flip one coin, if you flipped a thousand coins and you laid them all out in order,

what would happen is that there is an extremely high likelihood that somewhere in your 1000 coins you would have a string of tails tail tail tail tail as you were going along you might get 10 or 15 tails in a row which sounds like it isn't very random but actually is

almost guaranteed to happen if you are going to flip that number of coins in a row.

Now, this is really dangerous.

People might have heard, if they're interested in sport, they might have heard of the hot hand, or if there are people who have taken a trip to a casino and, you know, just gone there to entertain themselves, you might have heard of the gambler's fallacy, which is this idea that, oh, I haven't won many turns on this game, surely the next time I'm going to win.

Well, the mathematics of randomness tells us that even though it's tempting to believe that after losing 10 times, I'm likely to win the next time, if it's an equally likely outcome, if we went to the roulette wheel and we spun the ball around,

It's going to be an equal likelihood every single time.

It doesn't matter.

The roulette wheel doesn't care that you just lost 10 times.

It's going to start again.

And the chance of winning each time is unfortunately pretty low.

And that's why casinos make so much money.

So the mathematics of randomness is about being able to say, all right, even though

i can't necessarily know what's going to happen next i can expect some order to flow out of that and quite famously even random things in a population like say for instance the exact height of an individual when they're born you can't know how tall they're going to be you can guess based on how tall their their parents are that genetic material goes together in a mix you can't know for certain however over a large population just like with the 1000 coins

there is order that emerges.

We get this predictable shape called the normal distribution, more familiar to people as a bell curve.

So that randomness, the technical name is stochasticity, gives rise to order and predictability.

And that's why we can do things like predict the weather, even when there is some randomness involved.

Left-handedness is an unusual trait.