Impugning Randomness, Convincingly

  • Yuri Gurevich ,
  • Grant Olney Passmore

MSR-TR-2011-64 |

John organized a state lottery and his wife won the main prize. You may feel that the event of her winning wasn’t particularly random, but how would you argue that in a fair court of law? Traditional probability theory does not even have the notion of random events. Algorithmic information theory does, but it is not applicable to real-world scenarios like the lottery one. We attempt to rectify that.