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History of randomness — Wikipedia (en)

Source: Wikipedia (en)
Original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_randomness
License (as archived): CC-BY-SA-4.0
Archived: 2026-10-07T12:30:10.103Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: ff540802e9dcc8341785284b8109119d0e4b7faef4e7ec15c8470004e34b7710
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_eeaa02f81abb

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History of randomness — Wikipedia (en) — Wikipedia (en), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_randomness (CC-BY-SA-4.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_eeaa02f81abb (Metraipolis archive dc_eeaa02f81abb, sha256 ff540802e9dcc8341785284b8109119d0e4b7faef4e7ec15c8470004e34b7710)

BibTeX

@misc{dceeaa02f81abb,
  title = {History of randomness — Wikipedia (en)},
  howpublished = {Wikipedia (en)},
  url = {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_randomness},
  note = {License CC-BY-SA-4.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_eeaa02f81abb; sha256 ff540802e9dcc8341785284b8109119d0e4b7faef4e7ec15c8470004e34b7710},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC-BY-SA-4.0. Attribution: Wikipedia (en), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_randomness. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

In ancient history, the concepts of chance and randomness were intertwined with that of fate. Many ancient peoples threw dice to determine fate, and this later evolved into games of chance. At the same time, most ancient cultures used various methods of divination to attempt to circumvent randomness and fate. Beyond religion and games of chance, randomness has been attested for sortition since at least ancient Athenian democracy in the form of a kleroterion. The formalization of odds and chance was perhaps earliest done by the Chinese 3,000 years ago. The Greek philosophers discussed randomness at length, but only in non-quantitative forms. It was only in the sixteenth century that Italian mathematicians began to formalize the odds associated with various games of chance. The invention of modern calculus had a positive impact on the formal study of randomness. In the 19th century the concept of entropy was introduced in physics. The early part of the twentieth century saw a rapid growth in the formal analysis of randomness, and mathematical foundations for probability were introduced, leading to its axiomatization in 1933. At the same time, the advent of quantum mechanics changed the scientific perspective on determinacy. In the mid to late 20th-century, ideas of algorithmic information theory introduced new dimensions to the field via the concept of algorithmic randomness. Although randomness had often been viewed as an obstacle and a nuisance for many centuries, in the twentieth century computer scientists began to realize that the deliberate introduction of randomness into computations can be an effective tool for designing better algorithms. In some cases, such randomized algorithms are able to outperform the best deterministic methods.

Tema degli esploratori: storia e filosofia della scienza (deposito sistematico; categoria «History of science»).
Fonte: Wikipedia in inglese, voce «History of randomness» — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_randomness
Wikidata Q3558956 (dati Wikidata in CC0 1.0) — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3558956
Autori: i contributori di Wikipedia (cronologia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_randomness?action=history).
Licenza: Creative Commons Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Il riuso richiede attribuzione e stessa licenza.
Estratto dell'introduzione non modificato nel contenuto; revisione 1359591262, consultata il 2026-10-07T12:02:55.524Z tramite l'API ufficiale di Wikipedia. Impronta SHA-256 dell'estratto: 3bea7f1224fb3de518c8db5e8e49cc37f698f71abfc980df15c9d3deafa435fc