[FOM] normal numbers

David Ross ross at math.hawaii.edu
Thu Jul 19 04:36:25 EDT 2007


> Ver?nica Becher, Santiago Figueira. An example of a computable
> absolutely normal number.  Theoretical Computer Science 270,
> 947?958, 2002. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0304-3975(01)00170-0

I think this is the article I mentioned in my post.  My recollection is
that few if any actual digits of this number appeared in the article
(hardly surprising with double exponential complexity) - this wouldn't
have been very satisfying for a class of non-logic unergraduates!

What was the context of Turing's algorithm?  Did he set out primarily to
address this question, or was the paper a byproduct of something else?

> Is there a generally agreed-upon definition of normal number?

The further conditions are important for pseudo-random number
generation, but I believe the definition I gave is the
generally-agreed-upon definition for "normal".  At least, it is the one
that appears in all the probability texts I've seen/used which name the
concept.

David Ross



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