---
title: "History of randomness"
chunk: 1/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_randomness"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:40:15.668742+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In ancient history, the concepts of chance and randomness were intertwined with that of fate. Many ancient peoples threw dice to determine fate, and this later evolved into games of chance. At the same time, most ancient cultures used various methods of divination to attempt to circumvent randomness and fate.  Beyond religion and games of chance, randomness has been attested for sortition since at least ancient Athenian democracy in the form of a kleroterion.
The formalization of odds and chance was perhaps earliest done by the Chinese 3,000 years ago. The Greek philosophers discussed randomness at length, but only in non-quantitative forms. It was only in the sixteenth century that Italian mathematicians began to formalize the odds associated with various games of chance. The invention of modern calculus had a positive impact on the formal study of randomness. In the 19th century the concept of entropy was introduced in physics.
The early part of the twentieth century saw a rapid growth in the formal analysis of randomness, and mathematical foundations for probability were introduced, leading to its axiomatization in 1933. At the same time, the advent of quantum mechanics changed the scientific perspective on determinacy. In the mid to late 20th-century, ideas of algorithmic information theory introduced new dimensions to the field via the concept of algorithmic randomness.
Although randomness had often been viewed as an obstacle and a nuisance for many centuries, in the twentieth century computer scientists began to realize that the deliberate introduction of randomness into computations can be an effective tool for designing better algorithms. In some cases, such randomized algorithms are able to outperform the best deterministic methods.

== Antiquity to the Middle Ages ==

Pre-Christian people along the Mediterranean threw dice to determine fate, and this later evolved into games of chance. There is also evidence of games of chance played by ancient Egyptians, Hindus and
Chinese, dating back to 2100 BC. The Chinese used dice before the Europeans, and have a long history of playing games of chance.
Over 3,000 years ago, the problems concerned with the tossing of several coins were considered in the I Ching, one of the oldest Chinese mathematical texts, that probably dates to 1150 BC. The two principal elements yin and yang were combined in the I Ching in various forms to produce Heads and Tails permutations of the type HH, TH, HT, etc. and the Chinese seem to have been aware of Pascal's triangle long before the Europeans formalized it in the 17th century. However, Western philosophy focused on the non-mathematical aspects of chance and randomness until the 16th century.
The development of the concept of chance throughout history has been very gradual. Historians have wondered why progress in the field of randomness was so slow, given that humans have encountered chance since antiquity. Deborah J. Bennett suggests that ordinary people face an inherent difficulty in understanding randomness, although the concept is often taken as being obvious and self-evident. She cites studies by Kahneman and Tversky; these concluded that statistical principles are not learned from everyday experience because people do not attend to the detail necessary to gain such knowledge.
The Greek philosophers were the earliest Western thinkers to address chance and randomness. Around 400 BC, Democritus presented a view of the world as governed by the unambiguous laws of order and considered randomness as a subjective concept that only originated from the inability of humans to understand the nature of events. He used the example of two men who would send their servants to bring water at the same time to cause them to meet. The servants, unaware of the plan, would view the meeting as random.
Aristotle saw chance and necessity as opposite forces. He argued that nature had rich and constant patterns that could not be the result of chance alone, but that these patterns never displayed the machine-like uniformity of necessary determinism. He viewed randomness as a genuine and widespread part of the world, but as subordinate to necessity and order. Aristotle classified events into three types: certain events that happen necessarily; probable events that happen in most cases; and unknowable events that happen by pure chance. He considered the outcome of games of chance as unknowable.
Around 300 BC Epicurus proposed the concept that randomness exists by itself, independent of human knowledge. He believed that in the atomic world, atoms would swerve at random along their paths, bringing about randomness at higher levels.