generate

78 that's so random. Or is it?

what does it mean to be random?

can anything really be random what's the most random thing ever?

today let's stop being random and become ransmart

if something is unpredictable

and contains no recognizable patterns we call it random

So let's begin our hunt for the most random thing with a coin toss

the Australian 50 cent coin is one of the largest coins

currently in circulation

coin flips and rolling dice are not intrinsically random

they are only random because of our

ignorance if we could know every initial condition

the exact forces and properties that play for a particular flip or roll

we could theoretically calculate the result before it

even happened and sure enough researchers have built coin flipping robots

that can precisely control a flip to get the result they want

100 percent of the time

so here is our question. Is there anything you couldn't predict

even if you knew everything? A process determined

by nothing and how can you be sure they're

aren't any patterns in what you're looking at maybe you just haven't looked

for the right pattern yet

or maybe you have already seen true randomness

but didn't know it because you didn't look for long enough

as if protected by a sort of camouflage

a random process can and will occasionally produce patterns

YouTube URL's are pretty much

random a unique one is made for every uploaded video but sometimes

like the proverbial monkeys typing away on typewriters

YouTube generates a URL that contains by chance a word

the official music video for 50 cents

in da club contains a synonym for bottom

this video was assigned hello

there are some sexies and a sauce. If you want to find out if a particular word

has been randomly assigned to a video yet you can search for it

by using this string in Google

the point is, randomness is difficult to identify it is easier to be certain that something

is not random than that it is. But despite this elusiveness is something interesting

is going on right now increasingly we

especially young people are calling clearly predictable

things random

like randomly running into your best friend at a popular restaurant

or hilariously bizarre combinations of things that we call

totally random because they are seemingly unrelated

even though of course they were chosen not in random but in a very determined way

because they are all unrelated

those guys that showed up at the party last night you didn't know

the weren't randos in a mathematical sense

they knew about the party, we're in the mood to go to a party and we're in the area

pretty predictable actually

this non statistical use of the word random annoys

some people but it's not that far off from the original meaning

of the word. In the 1300's random

meant running or at great speed

later it would be used to describe things that have no definite purpose

it wasn't until the 1800's that random took on a particular mathematical definition

then in the 1970's MIT's student paper

popularized the use of the word random to simply mean strange

of course just because something is strange doesn't mean it has

no discoverable cause why if we started calling so many predictable things

random well many theories revolve around

the amount up information and new people we are confronted with

at an increasing rate now more than ever before

perhaps it's just easier almost a bit of a relief

to call things random so that we can move on

to synthesize other information take a look at this die

now as you can see it rolls a five most of the time

but not all the time overtime

a sequence of its results will contain less randomness

but it is still random any face is possible and I have no guarantee beforehand

of knowing which face will show up the outcomes I'm selecting from make the

resulting sequence less full of

randomness but the process is still random

even though a die and a coin are extremely sensitive to their initial conditions

and over the course of normal use are quite

unpredictable they do over time

exhibit certain biases. Biases that make them

a bit more predictable and a little less random

than you might think. First of all dice even precision dice are only quality

controlled within a few micrometers

you can check this out yourself make

two stacks of ten or more similar dice

now if you orient each die every which way you should pretty much get two equally sized stacks

but if you arrange each stack

along a shared axis so that every die faces the same way

any regular imperfections caused by the manufacturing process maybe come visible

but what about coins?

well some fantastic research has been done on what happens when they spin

and flip. For instance it has been found that US nickel is just the right diameter and

thickness to wind up landing

not heads up for tails up when flipped but on its

side, about once every six thousand times it's flipped

but what about the fairness of flipping a coin well if you flip a coin like

this or statistical and physical reasons the side facing up

before the flip begins, doesn't actually have a fifty percent chance of being the result

instead as researchers at Stanford have found it actually has

a fifty one percent chance in this case it was the other side though

still pretty random. If you want a coin flip to be as fair as possible

you should just catch it in your hand. Don't allow it to hit the ground, bounce, tumble

and spin. That's because researchers have found that when a coin spins

larger biases come into play. The shape of it's edge

it's center of gravity. The heavier side tends to go down

quite often in the case of some coins as often as

eighty percent of the time. It's been found that a one euro coin

will spin and land heads up more often than not

and a US penny will land tails up

more often than not when spun. But like I said

earlier theoretically if we knew everything about the initial conditions

of a coin flip or a die roll we could

calculate beforehand their outcome

why don't we do that more often?

well it's extremely difficult

insane amounts of precision would be required because the smallest

difference between two initial conditions can be magnified overtime

leading to chaotic extremely difficult to predict results

random.org the service Derek and I used

beginning at this video to generate a random number uses

atmospheric noise. It's extremely hard to predict

but technically still a deterministic system

all that noise came from somewhere and if we could just find out those initial

conditions we could

theoretically predict their outcomes

if we want a system more random

than that we will need to find one that is determined by nothing

and for that let's look closer. Quantumly close

quantum mechanics may have our answer

it describes the properties of quantumly sized things

as probabilities

just chances, not because we don't know enough yet to be certain

or predict but because, well the idea is

there's nothing there to predict

there is no beforehand we could know

whether or not a particular individual radioactive atom will decay or not

or whatever the spin of an electron is

is only knowable once we look. They're determined by a deep-seated

randomness woven into the universe itself

Einstein couldn't believe this he refused to accept as he said

that God played dice with the universe

but experiments

with entangled particles have shown

violations of Bell inequalities

entangled particles are particles that exhibit similar properties

even with separated by large distances

now if they agreed on those shared properties to have or are somehow

determined beforehand to have them their behaviors

should satisfy bells famous inequalities but experiments have found

that instead the likelihood of what a machine will see when measuring one particle

determines how the other machine will measure the other particle

it is here, when we look that the chance is determined. Explanations for this

are even weirder but what the results suggest is that

the chance of seeing particular quantum qualities

don't pre-exist

they happen when you look

so if you are ever feeling boring or

predictable just remember that you are made out of octillions

of quantum probabilities. Dice that don't tumble in any

analyzable way we could ever predict

they are the most random thing

God may play dice with the universe but they are

the best dice in the universe

and as always thanks for watching

but what does it all mean?

well true randomness doesn't mean anything I mean for us to have meaning we need

structure, predictability and that is what I'm exploring over on my channel, Veritasium

Wow okay so

let's go over there and take a look at what is

not random. Veritasium let's go

I'll see you guys over there. It's going to be awesome come with us

and as always

thanks for watching