> No machine can distinguish randomness from the behavior of a more complex machine than herself
It's true that in general a machine cannot prove that something is purely random, but a human can't do that either nor can anything else. If the smallest computer program that can generate a string of numbers is larger than the string itself then you could confidently say it is random; but Greg Chaitin proved a few years ago that in general you can't be certain that there is not a program shorter than the one you are looking at that will generate the string. Thus although almost all strings of numbers are random and thus incompressible, you can't prove that any particular string is random. Almost all the real numbers are random and not computable but neither humans nor computers can point to a single real number and truthfully say with certainty "that number is not computable, that number is random". John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
