Monthly Archives: May 2012

Drawing a natural number at random, foundations of probability, determinism, Laplace (8)

In the analysis so far, I have associated Benford’s law and Zipf’s law to be comparable. The main reason for this lies in the mixed motivations that I use to arrive at the proposed solution from post 4, which I … Continue reading

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Drawing a natural number at random, foundations of probability, determinism, Laplace (7)

We repeat the solution given in post 4 of this series, for the question of how to assign meaning to `drawing a natural number at random’, in order to explain the details of this solution, while building on the previous … Continue reading

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Drawing a natural number at random, foundations of probability, determinism, Laplace (6)

To illustrate what I mean with entropy (I’m not sure how well this corresponds with usual interpretations), let’s consider the throwing of a traditional die (marked with 1 through 6). It is seemingly borne out by experience that the odds … Continue reading

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Drawing a natural number at random, foundations of probability, determinism, Laplace (5)

(I suddenly doubted the previous post, and had to look and think twice again. I discovered that I need to look more in detail at Benford’s law, because certain aspects of the relation between the solution of the previous post … Continue reading

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Drawing a natural number at random, foundations of probability, determinism, Laplace (4)

(OK, enough apologized for all my shortcomings. From now on mostly math and philosophical thoughts on physics.) Back to the two fundamental questions which I deem relevant for the question of drawing a natural number at random. QUESTION 1   Is … Continue reading

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Drawing a natural number at random, foundations of probability, determinism, Laplace (3)

I updated the previous post with a disclaimer, which I repeat here: my knowledge and understanding of physics is very limited. In the past, this has withheld me a bit from asking the questions from the previous post, and their … Continue reading

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Drawing a natural number at random, foundations of probability, determinism, Laplace (2)

I probably 😉 chewed off more than I can swallow, certainly in one go… Still, my general lack of proficiency in probability theory should -I believe- not preclude me from asking certain questions, and offering uncertain answers. Like I stated … Continue reading

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Drawing a natural number at random, foundations of probability, determinism, Laplace (1)

The question whether the question `How to draw a natural number at random?’ can make sense, has been occupying a very small part of my curiosity for a long time. This started actually already in Probability 101 (by which I … Continue reading

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