Abstract
Randomness is a concept which is deeply entangled with bioinformatics. A random sequence cannot convey information, in the sense that it could be generated by a recipient merely by tossing a coin. Randomness is therefore a kind of ‘null hypothesis’: a random sequence of symbols is a sequence lacking all contraints limiting the variety of choice of successive symbols selected from a pool with constant composition (i.e. an ergodic source). Such a sequence has maximum entropy in the Shannon sense, i.e. it has minimum redundancy.
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© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Ramsden, J.J. (2004). Randomness and complexity. In: Bioinformatics: An Introduction. Computational Biology, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2950-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2950-9_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-015-7096-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-2950-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive