Have you ever taken a random walk in your life? Maybe not. It is most likely every walk you have taken is a conscious decision you made.
Random walk is a mathematical concept, where a series of steps are taken randomly from initial state and after a given time the final position will vary depending on the steps taken.
Imagine you are flipping a coin, staring 0 you add 1 if it is Heads and subtract 1 if it is tails. You do it for 50 times, and path and number you end up is a random walk with 50 steps.
Examples of random walk are found everywhere around us.
Brownian motion
When we were first introduced to biological sciences at school, we were introduced to microscopes and "Brownian motion". It is essentially a random motion of particles suspended in a medium. If you put an ink, drop into a glass of water no matter how slow you put it in, it will slowly dissolve. While looking through his microscope at pollen of the plant Clarkia pulchella immersed in water, Robert Brown saw this motion and described it random. It was named after him. To put forward how important this is, all our cells in our bodies depend on the random movement of these particles, as our cells are essentially drops of water covered by membranes.
Genetic drift.
Biologically genetic drift is the name given for accumulation of neutral mutations, which doesn't participate in natural selection. Even if you do not understand the biology behind this, it simply means, Total genetic map of a species evolves over time. It is a random process. There are many other places random walks are described in biology, astronomy and even psychology. More importantly in finance and computer science.
Stock market.
Consider the stock market. It seems the stock market is ever growing. Usually, it is with random fluctuations. Although individuals try to predict the stock market behavior by various models, it is known to be a true random process. There are too many variables come into play. Imagine that it is not. This person or group who can predict stock market are going to earn and "beat the market", while other players suffer losses.
World wide web
When the Web expands worldwide, travelling from one place to another through this is going to be difficult. How can you cover a lot of ground? Even algorithms behind these massive web giants use random walking in various parts of their applications, from measuring the size of the web to, providing you a list of recommended followers in twitter.
Now, let's get back to our question? A Random walk for life
Have you ever taken a random walk?
How about since your birth? We were born in a random place. With random parents and random siblings. We played with random friends who went to school because they were also randomly born in your age and neighboring your school.
How about walking in the park. Imagine you go to a park daily for a long time now. I can bet the path taken from entering to the park to getting out of it, is random in many ways. Imagine number of footsteps, exact location of each number of footsteps, imagine number of people you have met on your way, number of leaves you have stepped on. You may disagree. If you look at it, you may see patterns. Yet if you take a look at the big picture you will understand, some things in your life cannot be understood other than with randomness.
If you would not believe me, you would believe Steve Jobbs, right? He was talking about connecting dots of life at an address to university crowd. This is at peak of his life. And it is truly fascinating to understand the nature of randomness in our lives.
If you read the article The Boy, the dog and mathematics, I try to explain this pattern of nature in a story.
More insights about thinking in general can be found here in Deterministic world and free will.
In summary:
Random walk is a mathematical concept of taking random steps from a starting point
There are many examples for random walk in nature and science world.
Our life seems to be a random walk since birth although we do not feel like it.
Thank you for reading the article A Random walk for life. Have a nice random day!
Comments