Quasirandomness in Nature

Truthfully, my math is far too shitty to fully appreciate this post about observing an apparent pattern in the way raindrops collected on a patio table. However, I did learn a little bit about other kinds of randomness. I was already aware of pseudorandomness, as that's the kind I run into and use on a regular basis, but I had never heard the term quasirandomness before this post. The concept isn't foreign or strange — I just like the term.

From Brian Hayes' personal blog:

In selecting quasirandom points the aim is not equiprobability or independence but rather equidistribution: spraying the points as uniformly as possible across the area of the square

He goes into much more depth here in his article on American Scientist.

via waxy

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Published on Monday, July 18th 2011. Read this post as plain-text.