Post #414201 by BeezleBug on Sun, Oct 19, 2008 9:42 AM

Humankind has been concerned with random physical processes since pre-historic times. Examples are divination (cleromancy, reading messages in casting lots), the use of allotment in the Athenian democracy, and the frequent references to the casting of lots found in the Old Testament.

Despite the prevalence of gambling in all times and cultures, for a long time there was little inquiry into the subject. Though Gerolamo Cardano and Galileo wrote about games of chance, the first mathematical treatments were given by Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fermat and Christiaan Huygens. The classical version of probability theory that they developed proceeds from the assumption that outcomes of random processes are equally likely; thus they were among the first to give a definition of randomness in statistical terms. The concept of statistical randomness was later developed into the concept of information entropy in information theory.

In the early 1960s Gregory Chaitin, Andrey Kolmogorov and Ray Solomonoff introduced the notion of algorithmic randomness, in which the randomness of a sequence depends on whether it is possible to compress it.