God does not play dice but self-driving cars should

God does not play dice, but people should: random selection in politics, science and society

This paper discusses and proposes random selection as a component in decision-making in society. Random procedures have played a significant role in history, especially in classical Greece and the medieval city-states of Italy. We examine the important positive features of decisions by random mechanisms. Random processes allow representativeness with respect to individuals and groups. They sign...

God does not play dice: causal determinism and preschoolers' causal inferences.

Three studies investigated children's belief in causal determinism. If children are determinists, they should infer unobserved causes whenever observed causes appear to act stochastically. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds saw a stochastic generative cause and inferred the existence of an unobserved inhibitory cause. Children traded off inferences about the presence of unobserved inhibitory causes a...

Superior Colliculus Does Play Dice

Random is not a word often used in describing nervous system organization and its development. Yet, in this issue of Neuron, Owens et al. (2015) identify stochastic interactions of molecular and activity-dependent forces that can produce heterogeneous retinocollicular maps.

Self-Driving Cars

Learning from Pseudo-Randomness With an Artificial Neural Network - Does God Play Pseudo-Dice?

Inspired by the fact that the neural network, as the mainstream method for machine learning, has brought successes in many application areas, here we propose to use this approach for decoding hidden correlation among pseudo-random data and predicting events accordingly. With a simple neural network structure and a typical training procedure, we demonstrate the learning and prediction power of t...