Related papers: Chance and the Continuum Hypothesis
Lothar Collatz had proposed in 1937 a conjecture in number theory called Collatz conjecture. Till today there is no evidence of proving or disproving the conjecture. In this paper, we propose an algorithmic approach for verification of the…
A key issue in the handling of temporal data is the treatment of persistence; in most approaches it consists in inferring defeasible confusions by extrapolating from the actual knowledge of the history of the world; we propose here a…
An infinite game on the set of real numbers appeared in Matthew Baker's work [Math. Mag. 80 (2007), no. 5, pp. 377--380] in which he asks whether it can help characterize countable subsets of the reals. This question is in a similar spirit…
The intractability of any problem and the randomness of its solutions have an obvious intuitive connection. However, the challenge till now has been that there is no practical way to firmly establish if the solution to a problem is actually…
This paper shows how the classical finite probability theory (with equiprobable outcomes) can be reinterpreted and recast as the quantum probability calculus of a pedagogical or "toy" model of quantum mechanics over sets (QM/sets). There…
We prove an invariance principle for continuous-time random walks in a dynamically averaging environment on $\mathbb Z$. In the beginning, the conductances may fluctuate substantially, but we assume that as time proceeds, the fluctuations…
It is well-known that the Continuum Hypothesis (CH) is independent of the other axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with choice (ZFC). This raises the question of whether an intuitive justification exists for CH as an additional axiom, or…
The probabilistic predictions of quantum theory are conventionally obtained from a special probabilistic axiom. But that is unnecessary because all the practical consequences of such predictions follow from the remaining, non-probabilistic,…
There are many sources of error in counting votes: the apparent winner might not be the rightful winner. Hand tallies of the votes in a random sample of precincts can be used to test the hypothesis that a full manual recount would find a…
We formulate the Hauptvermutung of Causal Set Theory in two mathematically well-defined but different ways one of which turns out to be wrong and the other one turns out to be true. A further result is that the Hauptvermutung is true if we…
Let $f:\mathbb{R}^k\to \mathbb{R}$ be a measurable function, and let $\{U_i\}_{i\in\mathbb{N}}$ be a sequence of i.i.d. random variables. Consider the random process $Z_i=f(U_{i},...,U_{i+k-1})$. We show that for all $\ell$, there is a…
``Constants of Nature'' and cosmological parameters may in fact be variables related to some slowly-varying fields. In models of eternal inflation, such fields will take different values in different parts of the universe. Here I show how…
Randomness (in the sense of being generated in an IID fashion) and exchangeability are standard assumptions in nonparametric statistics and machine learning, and relations between them have been a popular topic of research. This short paper…
The topic of this paper is the subtle interplay between countability and representations. In particular, we establish that the definition of countability of a certain set $X$ crucially hinges on the associated equivalence relation $=_{X}$.…
The random Fibonacci chain is a generalisation of the classical Fibonacci substitution and is defined as the rule mapping $0\mapsto 1$ and $1 \mapsto 01$ with probability $p$ and $1 \mapsto 10$ with probability $1-p$ for $0<p<1$ and where…
I'll discuss how Goedel's paradox "This statement is false/unprovable" yields his famous result on the limits of axiomatic reasoning. I'll contrast that with my work, which is based on the paradox of "The first uninteresting positive whole…
Conventional Monte Carlo simulations are stochastic in the sense that the acceptance of a trial move is decided by comparing a computed acceptance probability with a random number, uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. Here we consider the…
In this paper, we develop a general theory on the coverage probability of random intervals defined in terms of discrete random variables with continuous parameter spaces. The theory shows that the minimum coverage probabilities of random…
The uncountability of the reals was first established by Cantor in what was later heralded as the first paper on set theory. Since the latter constitutes the official foundations of mathematics, the logical study of the uncountability of…
In this work, we develop a formal system of inductive logic. It uses an infinitary language that allows for countable conjunctions and disjunctions. It is based on a set of nine syntactic rules of inductive inference, and contains classical…