A Fractalific Blog

Friday, February 10, 2006

I have been working on the randomness assignment -

I thought I would mention some of my strategies that I felt did not give conclusive results. Mainly I did a lot of "counting."

I counted and compared the numbers of 0's and 1's and created an average thinking that the theory of large numbers would have the random set converge closer to 0.5.

I counted select permutations of three, such as 001, 100, etc... and compared rates of occurances in small samples (the first 26 sets of three encountered in each set) and compared the results with expected values of random numbers.

I counted strings of 0's and 1's (in seperate counts) that I considered "long" and therefore, less likely of occuring without structure. (I used strings strictly longer than 4.)

I did a few other counting scenarios as well. This method is pretty time consuming and did not make any serious distinctions between the sets. There was veritability between the results, but some came down on the side of suggesting set a was random by a small margin and others came down on the side of suggesting set b was random by a small margin. Nothing conclusive.