Wednesday 8 September 2010

I haven't blogged in a few days so here we go...

Bibliography so far:
BOOKS
Chance by Amir D. Aczel
Reckoning with Risk by Gerd Gigerenzer
Chaos by James Gleick
Randomness by Deborah J. Bennett
Introduction to random time and quantum randomness by Kai Lai Chung
Quantum Theory: A very Short Introduction by John Polkinghorne
Does God Play Dice? by Ian Stewart

WEBSITES
http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/random.html
RANDOM.ORG
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-randomness-rules-our-world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator
http://www.igs.net/~cmorris/index_subject.htm
http://ezinearticles.com/?Book-Review---Chance,-by-Amir-D-Aczel&id=3507603
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/441215.Chance
http://www.faqs.org/docs/qp/chap01.html

I should be having a meeting with my supervisor very soon, now that I am back at school. I need to ask if this is a good amount of sources considering my stage in the project.

Reading through Randomness:
The next chapter is about dice rolls and how the probability of each number coming up will change depending on the dice (e.g. having 2,2,3,4,5,6 instead of 1,2,3,4,5,6)
Bennett then talks about rolling two dice.

"[...] let's imagine using coloured dice, one red and one green. For each of the 6 possible throws on the red die, 6 are possible on the green die, for a total of 6 x 6 - 36 equally possible throws. But many of those yield the same sum. To make things even more complicated, different throws can result in the same two numbers. For example, a sum of 3 can occur when the red dice shows 1 and the green die shows 2, or when the red die shows 2 and the green die shows 1. Thus the probability of throwing a total of 3 is 2 out of 36 possibilities, or 2/36. A sum of 7, on the other hand, can be thrown 6 different ways - when red is 1 and green is 6; red is 6 and green is 1; red is 2 and green is 5; red is 5 and green is 2; red is 3 and green is 4; red is 4 and green is 3. Therefore the probability of throwing a 7 is 6/36"

This extract implies that if you throw two dice at random many times and writed down the total of the dice, one can predict that a total of 7 will occur more than a total of 3. This quote, like many others that I have found on the subject of probability, show that is isn't absolutely impossible to predict a random event - we havea rough idea of what the occurence of numbers should be when a dice (or 2) are thrown a certain number of times.

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