Strange terminology. In mathematical parlance the arrangement of the glowworms is still described as "random", but the positions of the worms simply are not independent of one another.
Can you expand on this? I'm curious. It seems to me that with the glowworms, knowing the position of one worm tells you something about the position of every other worm in the sample. If it was truly random, wouldn't it tell you nothing?
No, in mathematics the eye colour and hair colour of a randomly selected human being are considered random, even though knowing one tells you something about what the other is likely to be. Mathematically, "random" means distributed according to some definite (though perhaps unknown) distribution whereas in common parlance it means something like "not distributed according to anything definite at all" (though it's not clear that this way of defining things is even meaningful).
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Strange terminology. In mathematical parlance the arrangement of the glowworms is still described as "random", but the positions of the worms simply are not independent of one another.
Can you expand on this? I'm curious. It seems to me that with the glowworms, knowing the position of one worm tells you something about the position of every other worm in the sample. If it was truly random, wouldn't it tell you nothing?
No, in mathematics the eye colour and hair colour of a randomly selected human being are considered random, even though knowing one tells you something about what the other is likely to be. Mathematically, "random" means distributed according to some definite (though perhaps unknown) distribution whereas in common parlance it means something like "not distributed according to anything definite at all" (though it's not clear that this way of defining things is even meaningful).
Common parlance "random" seems to mean something more like "uniformly distributed and independent."