When in Doubt, Flip a Coin!
Channel: LearningFromData
Date: 2023-04-27

Oldie but goodie: Watson Lecture by a young Professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa of Caltech explaining the science  -  and humor  -  of randomness, with insight into its nature and its ironies.

https://work.caltech.edu

Description from the 1986 flyer:

Randomness is one of the mysterious aspects of life. At the intuitive level, we say that something is random if it is unstructured, unpredictable, patternless, or simply doesn't make sense. Mathematics (probability, statistics and mathematical logic) helps unify these concepts. Numerous examples of coping with randomness, understanding it and even taking advantage of it come from a wide spectrum of applications. Why is intelligence measured in the IQ test by the ability to recognize patterns? Why is image recognition a simple task for the brain but, so far, formidable for computers? What makes one theory in physics more plausible than another in interpreting experimental data? Why do some computer programs perform better if they are allowed to flip coins, so to speak? Why is it consistent rather than contradictory to get very regular statistics from totally random samples? These questions and many others can be addressed through the notion of randomness.