Originally Posted by zen_tom

What is random? Everything really ought to be deterministic (i.e. follow some kind of rules) it's just that we're unable to predict exactly what results the application of those rules is necessarily going to have at any one time. Hence the dice-roll is deterministic, as is the roulette wheel, the card-shuffle, the lottery-draw and the thoughts that are currently running through my head. None of them are easy (possible) to predict, but neither are any of them truely random. They all inhabit the realm of chaotic behaviour where both surprising order AND seeming chaos can co-exist and generate surprising emergent phenomenon.