Download What does it mean to be random?

What does it mean to be random?
Randomness in layman’s terms is used to mean “unpredictable” or “unexpected” as in
“random act of kindness” or “random act of violence”.
But to be truly random in scientific or mathematical terms means to have equal
probability of occurrence of all possible outcomes.
You can observe this randomness when you roll a die. If you role a 10 sided die 1000
times you would probably get one hundred 1’s, one hundred 2’s, one hundred 3’s… That
part does not seem random. What is random is the order that you would role the numbers
in.
On a computer there are random number generators. A random number generator is a
function that has been designed and tested to output different values at equal probability
but in an unpredictable order, just like rolling the die. The Random function we use in
StarLogo TNG is a random number generator. Given a range of numbers, the random
function returns a number randomly selected from within the range.
A “scatter” in StarLogo TNG is another function that produces random outcome. When
you use scatter to place your agents around Spaceland. Each agent has an equal
probability of being place in each patch.
To know if your output data is truly “random”, you must run your model with the same
settings many times (at least 100 times). If the probability of each outcome is equal over
the set of runs, then you can say that your outcomes exhibited randomness.