Attribute of a process that is entirely or largely governed by
chance, e.g., a roulette wheel, dice, the
brownian movement, but also the pattern on the screen of a television set receiving atmospheric
noise only. Perfect randomness rarely exists in nature and is difficult to simulate. In practice, randomness is confined by particular
parameters, e.g., a roulette wheel is expected to be random only within a range of numbers, not regarding how long the wheel takes to pick one, and it may even deviate from the ideal of uniform probabilities (
see probability ), e.g., when the roulette wheel is biased. The
simulation of randomness by
computers utilizes so-called pseudo random generators whose
behavior is nearly impossible to predict without knowledge of the starting number and its
algorithm (
see generative ) . (
Krippendorff )
