Writing "The history of randomness"

I have begun to write this section. I have collected most of the relevant quotes and sources - now I just need to sort them out.

Here is what I have so far (At the moment, it's pretty much just a bunch of sources)
The debate of whether randomness exists has been around for a very long time. The Chinese were perhaps the earliest people to formalize odds and chance 3,000 years ago. Chance mechanisms have been used since antiquity and people took advantage of its unpredictability to make quick decisions events such as settling disputes among neighbours and choosing which strategy to follow in the course of battle. In her book, Randomness, by Deborah J. Bennett states that "The purpose of randomizers such as lots or dice was to eliminate the possibility of human manipulation and thereby to give the gods a clear channel through which to express their divine will. Even today, some people see a chance outcome as fate or destiny, that which was 'meant to be'". This extract coincides with Albert Einstein’s famous quote – “God does not play dice”. To humans, it may seem as though there is no explanation for a random event, but in reality, it is just too complicated for our minds to understand.

The first atomist, Leucippus (circa 450 B.C.), said, 'Nothing happens at random; everything happens out of reason and by necessity'. The atomic school contended that chance could not mean uncaused, since everything is caused. Chance must instead mean hidden cause.
Another quote from Randomness:"[...] Newtonian physics - a system of thought which represented the full bloom of the Scientific Revolution in the late seventeenth century. [...] a belief developed among scientists that everything about the natural world was knowable through mathematics. And if everything conformed to mathematics, then a Grand Designer must exist. Pure chance or randomness had no place in this philosophy."
Another quote: "Though not always recognized or acknowledged as such, chance mechanisms have been used since antiquity: to divide property, delegate civic responsibilities or privileges, settle disputes among neighbors, choose which strategy to follow in the course of battle, and drive the play in games of chance."

Wikipedia - "Some theologians have attempted to resolve the apparent contradiction between an omniscient deity, or a first cause, and free will using randomness. Discordians have a strong belief in randomness and unpredictability. Buddhist philosophy states that any event is the result of previous events (karma), and as such, there is no such thing as a random event or a first event.

A quote by Jim French (physics PhD) : "The concept of being able to predict and describe the future behaviour of anything we wanted dates back to the 18th century and is typically associated with the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace and something called Laplace's Demon, which is some hypothetical creature that he thought of as (in principle and possibly way into the future) possessing sufficient knowledge of all the positions and speeds of all particles in the universe as to be able to perfectly predict the entire future evolution of the universe. This concept of causal or Newtonian determinism seemed unavoidable at the time, though it had some uncomfortable questions for the nature of free will, until the beginning of the twentieth century, when it ran into the twin problems of quantum theory and chaos theory. The latter presents no conflict with the principle of determinism, but it does in a practical sense. The physics of chaotic systems are still governed by underlying deterministic processes, but what was realised in the middle of the last century was that putting any knowledge of initial conditions into an actual prediction was far harder than previously realised. A small lack of precision in our knowledge of an initial state can quickly lead into huge uncertainty in the state of the system at some later time."

A quote from wikipedia: "In ancient history, the concepts of chance and randomness were intertwined with that of fate. Many ancient peoples threw dice to determine fate, and this later evolved into games of chance. Most ancient cultures used various methods of divination to attempt to circumvent randomness and fate.

. The Greek philosophers discussed randomness at length, but only in non-quantitative forms. It was only in the sixteenth century that Italian mathematicians began to formalize the odds associated with various games of chance. The invention of the calculus had a positive impact on the formal study of randomness. In the 1888 edition of his book The Logic of Chance John Venn wrote a chapter on "The conception of randomness" which included his view of the randomness of the digits of the number Pi by using them to construct a random walk in two dimensions.

The early part of the twentieth century saw a rapid growth in the formal analysis of randomness, as various approaches for a mathematical foundations of probability were introduced. In the mid to late twentieth century ideas of algorithmic information theory introduced new dimensions to the field via the concept of algorithmic randomness.

Although randomness had often been viewed as an obstacle and a nuisance for many centuries, in the twentieth century computer scientists began to realize that the deliberate introduction of randomness into computations can be an effective tool for designing better algorithms. In some cases such randomized algorithms outperform the best deterministic methods."

I have just emailed my suppervisor to arrange another meeting somtime next week.