Human civilization and the unpredictable have long been connected. Early humans were interested in randomness as a way to predict their futures. These techniques slowly evolved into games of chance and as tools for government work. With the Enlightenment came a whole new set of uses for randomness in describing scientific processes. Clearly, humans have many uses for generating random numbers.
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But what does a random number actually mean? Here’s a wordy formal definition from Wolfram MathWorld. Don’t worry if some of it goes over your head, I’ll explain it afterwards.
A random number is a number chosen as if by chance from some specified distribution such that the selection of a large set of these numbers reproduces the underlying distribution. Almost always, such numbers are also required to be independent, so that there are no correlations between successive numbers.
This is a lot of content, but it basically boils down to this: a random number cannot be predicted. However, we can usually make a claim about which numbers are more likely than others. For example, I can say with 100% confidence…
