A yes ... the random walk. Next time you're surveying, say, Hampstead Heath, why not do your very own Random Walk? It would no doubt make a refreshing change from your usual routine and take you to new and unexpected places . What could possibly go wrong !? Here's one, to give you the general idea...... There's lots of ways of generating your Random Walk..... here's the first one ever that got into print, and he* did it by giving the digits 0-7 a "direction" and then using the (endlessly infinite) value for "pi" to generate a series of steps. See below for a " for instance" .... As you will have noticed, such a technique tends to give a very thorough coverage of your survey area, and you would have plenty of variety, rather than the usual, routine, er route. Think of all the new people you might meet .. probably, many many times ! Here's the first dollop* of pi so that you too can use it ... 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273 and it goes on for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever You don't have to do it that way ... you could just have the "directions" on little cards which you shuffle and select at each new bit of your walk ... you could also have cards for various different distances as well. If you are simply going from A to B , you could "do" a simpler version ..... by flipping a coin say every 50 paces, and going right for heads and left for tails ... and you would get something like this ... but you might never get to B ! Here's the results of lots of "walks" like that .... the mathematics of it lead to some mind-boggling and rather unlikely scenarios as well. You will also notice that nobody on any of those walks has so far got to B. And they're not likely to any time soon. I hope they've brought sandwiches. And a tent. And a bottle of pop. If you fancy a try at all that, there's plenty of stuff about its complexities and odd outcomes on'n net .. but now, as a spot of totally unrelated music, here's First Aid Kit * with " Random Rules." * Of course, it was a he !
* The "dollop" is the SI unit of overwhelming loads of digits. ( OLODS) * Probably worth taking one with you on your random survey walk ...
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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