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"New Test Sizes Up Randomness," by Charles Seife. Science, 25 April 1997, page 532.
Mathematicians have long wrestled with the problem of producing a quantitative measure of randomness. This article discusses the work of Steve Pincus and Burton Singer, who have developed a quantitative measure of randomness in strings of digits. According to the article, their idea is built "on the observation that all possible digits are represented about equally in a perfectly random string of numbers." For example, the string 01101100 has equally many 0s and 1s. The next step is to examine how the digits come two at a time; if the string of numbers is truly random, the pairs 01, 10, 11, and 00 should all appear, and they should appear an equal number of times. The next step is to take digits 3 at a time, and so on. By comparing the frequency of the groups of digits to the expected frequency, one can calculate a measure of the randomness of the sequence. This work has the potential for important uses in cryptography and experimental design.
--- Allyn Jackson
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