

What does randomness look like? (2012) - xsace
http://www.wired.com/2012/12/what-does-randomness-look-like/

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mnw21cam
What isn't mentioned is the fact that British intelligence fed false news
article back to the Germans saying that the bombs had fallen short of their
target. The Germans then adjusted their flight paths to make the bombs fly
further, causing many of them to fly straight over London and land in the
countryside the other side.

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beejiu
Actually, the bombs were already falling short of the target. The British
instructed captured German spies to report they were hitting their targets.
They were quite subtle about how they did it -- they would simply omit news
about the bombs that fell short.

My favourite story is about Battle of the Beams
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams)),
where German bombers were guided by radio navigation. The British started
broadcasting their own radio signals to make it appear to the German planes
that the beam was slightly bent. It meant they could get the bombers to drop
their bombs in the middle of nowhere.

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cshimmin
Both distributions are random, they're just different kinds of random. The one
the article refers to as "random" is _uniformly distributed_, while the other
is not. Similarly, different _kinds_ of random distributions sound different!
Wikipedia has a nice article on various noise distributions with audio
samples:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise)

~~~
sillysaurus3
Brown noise sounds lovely, like a waterfall:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise)

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sramsay
_The British worried about the accuracy of these aerial drones. Were they
falling haphazardly over the city, or were they hitting their intended
targets?_

This is the seed of Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel _Gravity 's Rainbow_ \-- a
masterful, if difficult, novel about (among other things) paranoia.

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arethuza
I've never made it very far through Gravity's Rainbow (although I have tried
multiple times) but I'm pretty sure it's about the ballistic V-2 missiles
rather than the cruise-missile like V-1s.

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sramsay
That's true. It's about the V-2s (in particular, one mysterious weapon the
Germans appear to be building called the "Schwarzgerät," with serial number
0000).

But that business of trying to figure out whether the bombs are random or not
is central to the book. There are a lot of statisticians running around trying
to figure out why the pattern of bomb blasts corresponds to the Poisson
distribution.

(Of course, there's also a character whose erections appear to predict bomb
blasts. Postmodernism, ftw).

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myfonj
Other thing that wasn't mentioned is the actual mechanism that caused that
'controlled randomness':

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb#Guidance_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb#Guidance_system)

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artumi-richard
[http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Random%20Number%20Generator](http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Random%20Number%20Generator)

~~~
jschulenklopper
And of course this one: [http://xkcd.com/221/](http://xkcd.com/221/)

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thanatropism
_what does Poisson-distributed randomness look like?

Events generated by Poisson processes or amenable to the small-p binomial
approximation look like Poisson. Events not amenable to the small-p
approximation look Gaussian. Extreme value measurements (flood water levels,
auction prices) look Weibull, Fréchet or Gumbel.

Appropriate statistical methodologies are appropriate. _ sigh _

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autokad
i read somewhere that showed the V1's had a higher kill rate of RAF pilots
than German fighters, with no losses of german pilots. Couldnt find it though,
anyone else?

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vecter
That's extremely unlikely. How is kill rate defined?

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etrevino
I believe he means kill ratio. So, the number of planes shot down versus the
number of V-1s shot down. If one RAF fighter was shot down for every two V-1s
the ratio would be 2:1 in favor of the RAF.

This is a little bit plausible. This is how the RAF shot down V-1s:
[http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/08/article-1384740-0B...](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/08/article-1384740-0BF424C400000578-18_636x774.jpg)
(picture courtesy of the Daily Fail)

So, the kill ratio of V-1s might have been higher against the RAF because it
was so hard to down V-1s and doing so was hazardous. We're still talking a
tiny fraction of the craft engaged, though.

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autokad
Yes, according to the chart above it took down 351 aircraft. The toppling
method wasnt the only one implemented, they also tried shooting them down with
their guns; however, they would have to get close and often resulted in the
destruction of their own aircraft as well.

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etrevino
I wish I'd noticed that chart earlier. You're right, the V1 ratio was much
better.

