CHANCE

The absence of lawfulness or regularity. While logic contrasts chance with necessity, cybernetics focuses attention to the fact that chance events are inherently unpredictable and expresses the expectation of such events by their probability (other than zero or one). Since chance presupposes alternatives (an event may or may not occur or may be of various kinds). One measure characterizing the probability distribution of chance events is entropy. Thus entropy can be interpreted either as a measure of ignorance about possible events (see uncertainty) or as a measure of lawlessness or unpredictability. In communication processes, the uncertainty induced by the inherently unpredictable errors of transmission is called noise. (Krippendorff)

* Next

* Previous

* Index

* Search

* Help

URL= http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/ASC/CHANCE.html