Tiny particles like pollen grains move constantly, pushed and pulled by environmental forces. To study this motion, physicists use a “random walk” model — a system in which every step is determined by ...

Have you ever come across a statement like this: “I can’t believe that something as beautiful and complex as the human eye could be the result of a random process like evolution”? Or this: “It seems ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career: Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important ...

In the real world, probability is a tough thing to characterize. If I roll a die, what does it mean to say that it has a one-sixth chance of coming up 5? We say that the outcome is random because we ...

Here’s a game Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented in 1948. He was trying to model the English language as a random process. Go to your bookshelf, pick up a random book, open it ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract Random walks are a fundamental model in applied mathematics and are a common example of a Markov chain. The limiting stationary distribution ...

A former IOS software engineer at Tumblr has described Apple’s App Store review process as perplexing, random, discordant, and asinine. He claims that his view is shared by the “vast, vast majority” ...