/sci/ - Science & Math

Good morning /sci/entists!

I came from the Dra/g/on Maid board to talk to the people who like playing with math.

I like non-deterministic programming languages and I make them for fun. I made up an abstraction to power my languages called a Maid Library.

Experimenting with randomness has led me to some questions.

Are there different kinds of random?

>big long dra/g/on maid word problem

Ilulu lives in your computer and she is bored. She wants to go to the Maid Library and do some experiments with Maid Books (See atrached figure. It's your Ilulu).

So Ilulu goes to the maid library and she's wandering around STANDARD section of the library, eating pumpkin seeds she got out of the vending machine in the front and she finds a maid book called "S-COIN".

Maid Books in the STANDARD section are non-deterministic. When you read the book, you read one chapter randomly. All the chapters have the same odds of being read, and reading a chapter does not modify the Maid Book.

The S-COIN book represents a fair coin. It contains only two chapters. One containing HEADS and the other containing TAILS.

Ilulu takes the book and wanders into the DIMINISHING section where she finds a similar book called D-COIN. Maid Books in the DIMINISHING section of the library are also non-deterministic, but when a chapter is read from a DIMINISHING Maid Book it is removed from the book.

D-COIN initially contains four chapters. Two reading HEADS and two reading TAILS.

Ilulu quickly discovers that though the expected probability of S-COIN is 50/50, the observed ratio can differ. Four flips of S-COIN can even end in four HEADS. The diminishing Maid Book, D-COIN, while also non-deterministic is guaranteed to be 50/50 HEADS vs TAILS if Ilulu reads it 4 times.

>actual questions
Are these different kinds of random? Is the S-COIN more random than the D-COIN? How do we measure or prove that? What books should I read to learn about randomness?