RANDOM

Attribute of a process that is entirely or largely governed by chance, e.g., a roulette wheel, dice, the brownian movement, but also the pattern on the screen of a television set receiving atmospheric noise only. Perfect randomness rarely exists in nature and is difficult to simulate. In practice, randomness is confined by particular parameters, e.g., a roulette wheel is expected to be random only within a range of numbers, not regarding how long the wheel takes to pick one, and it may even deviate from the ideal of uniform probabilities (see probability), e.g., when the roulette wheel is biased. The simulation of randomness by computers utilizes so-called pseudo random generators whose behavior is nearly impossible to predict without knowledge of the starting number and its algorithm (see generative) . (Krippendorff)

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