FanGraphs Audio: Dave Cameron Analyzes All Rational Actors
June 22, 2015
Episode 575
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he presupposes that everyone is abiding by reason.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 47 min play time.)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.
Subscribe: RSS
Carson Cistulli has published a book of aphorisms called Spirited Ejaculations of a New Enthusiast.
Most RNGs are referred to as pseudo-random. The programmers use a formula with a seed number (often based on a clock) that generates a very large number from which they determine their pseudo-random number.
Indeed, and many exhibit bad statistical qualities when used to generate large quantities of random numbers (see the Wikipedia entry for a fairly approachable elaboration).
Though I enjoyed Cameron’s recursive RNG design: to get a random number, start with a list of numbers and pick one at random (doing so, of course, by generating a random number).
That said, there do exist hardware random number generators that generally rely on noise (thermal or electromagnetic) as an input, and (if designed and operated correctly) are considered true rather than pseudo RNGs, though in some sense they may not be.
One thing that is believed to be truly random is radioactive decay (for individual atoms; in large quantities they exhibit a predictable distribution — one result of which is the concept of “half-life”, and another is the technique of radiocarbon dating). That bothers some physicists (and philosophers), prompting Einstein’s quote that “God does not play dice with the universe.” (Yet all work since then suggests that his intuition was wrong: there are no “hidden variables” and not only does God play dice, he rolls them where we cannot see.)
Was just about to post the same remark. The math of randomness is a fascinating subject and true randomness is much harder to come by than you’d think.