The lost beetle

Do you know how many times you use “Probably” in a day? The word is a part of our colloquial expression because society embraces uncertainty, disorder and randomness as natural. Whether it’s a rolling die, a tossing coin, or an event, uncertainty is everywhere. This is why the society believes that a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas.
But mathematicians have illustrated a very contrary certainty again and again, the certain pattern of randomness. Imagine a robotic beetle placed in a twisting tube. The creature executes an infinite random walk by walking forever as it moves randomly one step forward or one step back in the tube. Assume that the tube is infinitely long. What is the probability (chance) that the random walk will eventually take the beetle back to its starting point?
In 1921, Hungarian Mathematician George Pólya proved that the answer is one – infinite likelihood of return for a one dimensional random walk. If the beetle were placed at the origin of a two – space universe (a plane), and then the beetle executed an infinite random walk by taking a step north, south, east, or west, the probability that the random walk would eventually take the beetle back to the origin is also one.
Let me take you through some more random patterns which has intrigued mathematicians for ages. Parrondo’s Paradox. In the late 1990’s, Spanish physicist Juan Parrondo showed how two games guaranteed to make a player lose all his money can be played in alternating sequence to make the player rich….
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