Green Card Lottery Judgment Favors Mathematical Randomness

guusbosman writes "Yesterday a district court in Washington, D.C. issued its ruling in a case that boiled down to the definition of 'strictly random.' In the 2011 drawing of the U.S. 'Green Card Lottery,' a computer programming error was made and two weeks after the official drawing of the lottery the Department of State closed the website and voided the results. A lawsuit sought an injunction claiming that, while the process was not mathematically random, it was random in the dictionary definition of 'without definite aim, direction, rule or method.' The court, analyzing language from the State Department's regulations, and examples from laws on casinos and the like, rejected that and came out in favor of a mathematical definition of randomness. The lottery is voided and the results of the new drawing came out today at noon EST."

Comments

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

That's random.

Re:Well

[darkwing_bmf]

But in your example, the jury is attempting to rule on the basis of scientific fact. An "expert" in court is deemed to be as credible as the "expert" that wrote the textbook.

Re:Well

[maxwell demon]

Well, the point was that for a large number of applicants (namely all those who didn't apply during the first two days), the probability of being chosen was exactly zero.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why we have an adversarial system* and a jury. The guy's defense attorney should have hit hard on that and destroyed the "expert" witness's credibility, and the jury should then discount his testimony accordingly -- the judge shouldn't need to say whether it's scientific or not. The judge is involved in interpreting the law only, the jury is responsible for the facts (and to some heavily-disputed degree, the law as well).

In this case, OTOH, it's a question of law, i.e. what exactly is the relevant definition of a particular word in the law, so naturally the judge is involved.

* Of course, an adversarial system's not so hot when the government has a good prosecutor and you get stuck with a crappy public defender; don't know if that was an issue in this case, but it's a well-known problem without any real good solutions...

Re:Well

[Ruke]

The problem was that the buggy algorithm only randomly selected entries that were submitted during the first two days that the submission system was open. The law specifies that entries are to be selected "in a random order," which implies (at least to the judge) that all of the entries must be shuffled in, and given equal probability of being chosen.

Re:Well

[wagnerrp]

For example, in the arson trial of a Texas man who supposedly (for no credible reason) murdered his wife and children they brought in arson 'experts' who had no scientific validity to their process at all. A Texas arson expert looks at some char marks and somehow always (whenever it is a criminal investigation) concludes "it's arson". Despite the improbability of every fire said 'expert' examines during his career being caused by a crime.

Well this is surely a weighted claim if I've ever heard one. Just think about this for a moment.

Scenario 1: A building burns down. An expert comes in and calls it arson. Arson being a crime, the police investigate, find a suspect, put them on trial, and the expert is presented as a witness explaining why they think it is arson.

Scenario 2: A building burns down. An expert comes in and calls it accidental. Accidents are not crimes. There is no investigation, no suspect, and no trial for the expert to sit at and say it was not arson.

So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?

Re:Well

[the gnat]

Of course, an adversarial system's not so hot when the government has a good prosecutor and you get stuck with a crappy public defender; don't know if that was an issue in this case, but it's a well-known problem without any real good solutions...

I think the problem in this case was not so much with the lawyering - rather, the low quality of the evidence and testimony was not apparent until years later. (By which point the convict had already been executed, unfortunately.)

Re:Well

[enjerth]

The only impressive thing here is that the judge (or his aides) apparently cracked open a dictionary or maybe even a math textbook to get a basic idea of what "random" means. Unfortunately, the judiciary doesn't always rule on the basis of absolute mathematical or scientific fact, when it is relevant to the case.

I don't get it. What's the deal with distinguishing the difference between the mathematical and dictionary definition of random? The argument that it fits the dictionary definition does not hold water.

To suggest that a process which methodically ignores eligible applications is "without definite aim, direction, rule or method" is erroneous. Excluding applicants that filed after the second day is both a method and quite definite.

Re:Well

[darkmeridian]

The Supreme Court once ruled that a tomato was a vegetable even though it is scientifically a fruit. That case, Nix v. Hedden, dealt with a tariff on vegetables but not fruits. The government taxed tomatoes as vegetables even though they were botanically fruit. Tomato importers who had paid the taxes sued. The Supreme Court ruled that even though tomatoes were botanically fruit, the law was meant vegetables in the colloquial sense. Go for lawyers!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden

Re:Well

[blueg3]

A string of numbers is never random in and of itself -- it's the method by which they are generated that is random or not. The sequence "9 9 9" is random if and only if it happens to be the output of a random function.

What you perhaps mean is that any string of numbers could have been the output of a random function. That's not strictly true, but it's close enough. You certainly can't tell just by looking at the string of numbers whether it's really the output of a random function -- though you can often make a good guess.

Re:Well

[Dahamma]

It wasn't that crazy, though, since the tariff was on "vegetables", which itself is not a scientific word - so applying a scientific term in the first place wasn't valid. In fact, the original definition of "vegetable" was *all* plants. That would have been a cool Supreme Court ruling...

Re:Well

[ShooterNeo]

Because he would investigate every scene, and ALWAYS say it was arson. Because there was no statistical or numerical way to show if a particular burnt patch ACTUALLY was arson, beyond a reasonable doubt. Because the supreme court bitchslapped it down, after the state of Texas murdered the man, and they released several other prisoners sent to prison for the same reason.

Re:Well

[Vellmont]

So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?

You're missing the point. Of course arson investigators hired by the government are going to testify that arson occurred more often than they say it was accidental. The point is that arson investigations are often conducted by people totally unqualified to do so.

I saw the Frontline episode the OP is talking about. One of the many points it tries to bring home is that fire investigators in many states don't have any scientific training in how fires spread, and are more often than not just experienced fire-fighters "with a hunch". They haven't conducted scientific studies on fire, don't have degrees in science, and have little more knowledge about fire than simply having experience. Experience without theory, and rigor is little more than a series of anecdotes. Frontline showed the opinion of an ACTUAL expert (with scientific training, academic study, and experimental evidence) who said it was quite obvious that the fire was accidental if you've studied how fires happen.

Now it so happens that this was a jury trial, so the judge had little or no involvement in deciding whether the fire investigator was qualified or not. So this isn't a particularly good counter-example of a judge making a bad ruling.

Re:Well

[The_mad_linguist]

The process is generally

Scientist: What do we call stuff like this?
General Public: Vegetables
Scientist: OK.
-Time passes-
Scientist: Hmm. There seems to be a difference between some things in this group and other things in this group. I'll exclusively call the other things vegetables.
-Time passes-
Scientist: What do we call stuff like this?
General Public: Vegetables
Scientist: You're wrong, you idiots.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Suppose it was illegal to be exactly six feet tall - so if a police officer suspected someone of being exactly six feet tall they would call in an expert - and the expert would always determined that the suspect was exactly six feet tall - even when the expert obviously had no way of know (e.g. over the phone).

That was the situation in Texas - except with a particular arson "expert" that the state used to obtain death penalty convictions.

Re:Well

[Vellmont]

And the supreme court made the right call.

Are you trying to argue that words can't have multiple meanings? Language is evolving all the time, and it's not controlled by one group of people. Context matters, and in this case the context wasn't a botanical one. People don't treat tomatoes like fruit, they treat it like a vegetable. This is legislation, not a scientific paper in botany.

Re:Well

[wagnerrp]

One of the many points it tries to bring home is that fire investigators in many states don't have any scientific training in how fires spread, and are more often than not just experienced fire-fighters "with a hunch". They haven't conducted scientific studies on fire, don't have degrees in science, and have little more knowledge about fire than simply having experience. Experience without theory, and rigor is little more than a series of anecdotes. Frontline showed the opinion of an ACTUAL expert (with scientific training, academic study, and experimental evidence) who said it was quite obvious that the fire was accidental if you've studied how fires happen.

You can bring in expert witnesses to say whatever you want them to say. It is the job of the defense attorney to question their conclusions, their training, their credentials. If they can't do that, then they're of no worth.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

The erroneous behaviour wasn't intentional. The plaintiff's argument was that because the later applicants weren't excluded by deliberate human action, they weren't excluded by any "aim, direction, rule or method".

If you say that the program excluded them by "aim, direction, rule or method", you could say exactly the same thing about any PRNG. The rule by which applicants are selected would be more complicated, but it's still a rule.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

You make a good point, but you are assuming that the police are on an unbiased quest to discover the truth, and that only one expert can be used.

If the police are in fact going all out to secure a conviction, they can keep asking different arson "experts" until one of them says "it's arson".

Or if you are a cynic, you might believe that the police have a frequently-used "tame arson expert" whose sole job is to repeat whatever the police tell him to say.

There is a very high likelihood that an expert witness will claim that the fire was NOT arson - and that witness will be representing the defendant.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

The one thing that Slashdotters tend to have the hardest time understanding is that words can have different meanings in different contexts. Unless the word is "free". Then they have no problem with it, and argue to the death the appropriate contextual meaning. But then those same people, when confronted with a discussion about, for example, organic food, will turn rabid and starting obliviously shouting "all food is organic!".

Context is hard.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with your analysis and commentary from the presented situation, I actually recognize the likely case the OP is referring to

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

I strongly recommend reading this article about it as it was one of the most powerful pieces I ever read in the New Yorker and brought to light, at least to me, that most arson investigators are generally anything but reliable and that, more importantly, our justice system failed Cameron Todd Willingham in the gravest of ways.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

The non-buggy algorithm selects entries whose rank satisfies some iterated linear congruential equation. That's not an equal probability either.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got an even crazier idea. Let's rule that a corporation is a person, grant it all the freedoms and protections of a person, and then give it a different income tax rate than a person has. Also, for the heck of it, let's get indignant if anyone questions us.

It'll be fun.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?

Depends, is he the plaintiff's or the defense's expert witness?

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dilbert cartoon can be interpreted as a subtle math joke as well, in the sense that because _any_ random number generator that can generate 9s can also generate an infinite string of 9s, so that one can never be sure that a string of 9s did not come from a random source.

The more 9s one sees, the more probable that the source is not truly, but that probability will never reach 100% (To be extra pedantic, even events with probability 1 can be just 'almost sure', e.g. the probability of drawing the number 5 out of a bag of all the integers is 0, so almost surely one will not draw a 5 out of such a bag, but the possibility can't be entirely eliminated).

Re:Well

[Confusador]

So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?

50/50 - depending on whether he's been hired by the prosecution or the defense.

Re:Well

[Confusador]

Look up the fallacy of equivocation sometime. A tomato is both a fruit and a vegetable, depending on the context. Your problem is that you realize you have to qualify the "scientific definition", but don't consider that the court may be using the culinary definition. Which makes sense, since from a scientific perspective you'd be crazy not to call all fruits vegetables. Quoth Wikipedia:

As an adjective, the word vegetable is used in scientific and technical contexts with a different and much broader meaning, namely of "related to plants" in general, edible or not — as in vegetable matter, vegetable kingdom, vegetable origin, etc.

Re:Well

[superwiz]

And what would be the harm in having all those who applied after the 1st two days given a 2nd chance? Rescinding the offer puts the cost of the mistake on those who won with a higher chance. But they didn't do anything to cause that mistake to happen. So why should they pay the price? Having a slight increase in the number of green cards issued during one month would not have harmed anyone.

Re:Well

[Ihmhi]

So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?

I suppose that depends on how much an expert witness is paid to testify in court.

Re:Well

[kaatochacha]

Your argument assumes that the number of people immigrating is irrelevant and has no impact on the US. That being the case, why not simply do away with numbers and let anyone who wants to immigrate? Even if you truly believe that, what about the effect on the countries that are losing people. Some of them might be the ones to improve their home country considerably. In other words, I don't think it's a one off issue, that can be easily dismissed.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem was not a buggy algorithm. The technical problem was that there was no algorithm at all, so the numbers got assigned in disk-storage order (the order you get when you query a database without specifying an order). The real problem was that the Department of State changed vendors at the 11th hour and the new one didn't know what they were doing.

Re:Well

[superwiz]

Actually, no. My argument assumes that fairness requires the party which is responsible for the mishap to bear the burden of its consequences. Since the people with increased chance of receiving a green card were in no way responsible, they should not be bearing the cost of having received and consequently rescinded allotment. The cost should be born by the responsible party. In this case the mishap was result of an error by a US government service. So it should be the INS (as an agent of the US government) which should be forced to bear the burden of extra allotment.

Definition?

[gmuslera]

Sometimes xkcd is pretty relevant

Re:Definition?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucks for those that got screwed but definitely a good decision.

Re:Definition?

[AK Marc]

No, it's not fair. They should have let both sets "win."

Re:Definition?

[ideaz]

Another great example is the Sony PS3's code in the ROM which was supposed to give out random sequences. apparently it was hard coded

Re:Definition?

[am 2k]

Here's another one: Dilbert.

Re:Definition?

[GeneralSecretary]

sometimes Dilbert's are relevant too: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/

Re:Definition?

[istartedi]

I wonder if he had Revolution 9 in mind when he did that.

BTW, I seem to recall that it won "least popular Beatles song" in some survey although I don't have a citation.

Re:Definition?

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

No, it's not fair. They should have let both sets "win."

They should have, but they probably couldn't have legally--at least not easily. Even a court (as opposed to the issuing agency) doesn't have the power to overrule a Congressional statute--the only real option would have been to find a Constitutional basis for letting both sides win that overruled the statute in this instance. Maybe you could call it a due process right--if it were appealed, though, it would probably be reversed, and judges don't like to be reversed.

Re:Definition?

[AK Marc]

It's just a law. The head of the department should have walked into Congress and said "Hi, we made a mistake and I need you to pass a law to fix it." As long as they can put down the partisan bickering for 5 minutes a day for about a week, then a new law could have been passed raising the cap for that one lottery selection and making it all legal. I never said it would be legal. I never said that the agency could make the call without outside assistance. I just said that's what "should" have happened.

Re:Definition?

[kaatochacha]

What's an intensive purpose?

Re:Definition?

[Anonymous Coward]

A test. You only scored 25% or so.

Re:Definition?

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as they can put down the partisan bickering for 5 minutes a day for about a week

Ha. Ha ha ha ha. Ha, ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha.

You're exactly right and, tragically, it will never happen. Especially over something as politically charged as immigration. The US political system is seriously broken.

Finally, logic and reason win out.

[ScooterComputer]

With all the rest of the ridiculousness going on in this country, it is quite refreshing to see that logic and reason--and scientific basis--can still win the day occasionally.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[TheGratefulNet]

lets see, we have this english randomness and this, what do you call it, math randomness?

is this math randomness hard?

(no.)

expensive?

(no)

can we do it?

(yes)

ok, so go do it.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

It's pretty obvious that it wasn't a question of logic and reason, it was a question of fairness - either every applicant had an equal opportunity to be selected, or they didn't. As first run, the lottery didn't provide that, which is why they voided the results in the first place, and why the court agreed with them.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[AK Marc]

They made a decision. They told people they had been approved. They then changed their minds. Whether the first selection was fair, whether the first results were valid, does not change the fact that the treatment of those who won the first round was unfair. It's sad when process is more important than people.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[AK Marc]

it was a question of fairness

So telling people that they were accepted, then telling them that they weren't accepted is fair? Why wouldn't it have been more fair to accept both groups?

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

While it sucks that they had to reverse on a bunch of people, there is the persistent problem of how deeply ugly things get when you let people be more important than process...

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wouldn't it be? If you won unfairly, you won unfairly, regardless of who was at fault. You invalidate the invalid results, and generate valid ones.

And as for why we don't accept both, the answer is, "For all the same reasons we issue x green cards instead of 2x green cards, every year."

It really isn't complicated. Unless you're trying to make some kind of vague political point?

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

No. Accepting both groups is not "more fair", it's still skewed. All they originally purported to offer was an equal opportunity to be selected. They found that they hadn't provided that, so they voided the results and tried again, this time ensuring that every applicant had an equal probability of being selected.

NOTE: Real Life sometimes contains disappointments.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont get it. Could you examplify this?

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Dahamma]

Reversing the lottery was unfair to the tiny fraction who were selected. Not reversing it would have been unfair to the huge majority (as TFA says, the bug was that only the first 2 of 30 days worth submissions were considered). So, statistically this was by far the better solution to be *fair* to the most people.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[AK Marc]

You won. They notified you that you won. Then they notified you "oops." That's unfair. The question is, which unfair do you follow through with, the one that hurts people, or the one that helps people. They chose to hurt people. You agree with them.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[AK Marc]

Both are skewed. You are defending only one. You are defending the one that hurts people and puts the process as more important than the people involved. Why?

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[AK Marc]

The system broke. The process was invalid. So, do you harm people to "protect" the process, or do you state "we made an error, and we are going to fix this by allowing in those notified they were approved, as well as re-holding the selection to be fair to everyone else." That's the the most fair way I see to handle it, and it isn't even something they appeared to consider.

It just seems silly to me to defend the process so strongly when it's proven it was broken.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well "fair" is a childish word not very meaningful in a court of law. The court decided that the lottery was not conducted in accordance with its established rules. Even though the error was not deliberate, the results must be therefore invalidated. Seems reasonable (a better legal term than fair) to me.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Nethead]

Replace "people" with "spelling of candidate's name" and you almost have Alaska's last senatorial election.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[AK Marc]

But I don't see "reverse" and "don't reverse" as the only two options. And I assert that allowing both groups would be more fair than revoking the approval for one of them.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[AK Marc]

There comes a time when an error can not (or should not) be reversed. Assume they look back at the previous years and noticed the same problem. Would it be "reasonable" to revoke the immigration status of all of them? If not, why not? If you agree with me that there is some time after which the initial problem could not or should not be "fixed" then, it just becomes a discussion of when.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm just having trouble seeing how anyone was genuinely hurt, short of a seriously questionable "I'm emotionally distressed" argument. It's not like they pulled the bogus results a month later... it was, what, 5 days? Nobody had been permitted permanent residence yet.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[MattGWU]

Well sure, when it comes to keeping people out of the country, only the best will do, even if that means a grudging nod to 'reason' or 'science' when convenient.

So how are those voting machines lately?

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't described, "unfair". The word is, "unfortunate".

They shouldn't let that happen again, but fair is fair, and they should stick with that. Nobody is entitled to anything here.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[malacandrian]

Regarding this and your replies to my sibling posts, you clearly have your concepts of fairness and pleasentness confused. To be fair is to play the game according to the rules, i.e. the green cards are distributed in a manner such that all candidates have an equal chance of attaining one, and only a predetermined number are being issued. Accepting just the first group would be unfair as not all candidates had an equal chance. Accepting both groups would be just as unfair as it breaches another rule of the game. You cannot do that and call it far for the same reason that either the Giants or the Ranngers had to win the last world series, they could not both win. To accept both groups would be unfair on all the entrants from other years who only got the one chance to win. To accept both groups would be unfair on whomever whatever council it was that decided the correct number of greencards to be issued represents as it would be a suboptimal number for that year. They all signed up to the game one way or another. To change the rules midflow and argue that it is fair to do so requires a severe disconnection from any rational definition of the term

Now don't get me wrong, there is no way that it was nice for any of those people to receive a rejection after thinking they had it. But unfair or unjust it was not.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[waives]

The "process" of choosing winners was what was broken, but you seem to be continually confusing this with the process of immigration control. Whether it is right or fair to restrict immigration is an entirely separate issue that has little to do with this decision.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[waives]

You keep repeating this but offer nothing to support your assertion.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[OrangeTide]

no people were harmed in the making of this film.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Vellmont]

Why wouldn't it have been more fair to accept both groups?

It likely would have been more fair. But the law only allows for a certain amount of green cards to be issued. The law still usually trumps "fairness".

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Dahamma]

This wasn't a TV call-in prize, it was an act of Congress that allowed 50,000 visas awarded randomly among ALL applicants. Hence the Supreme Court decision, which was only concerned with following the law.

When election results are screwed up, they do a recount, they don't feel bad for the guy they mistakenly declared the winner and give him an extra position. Sometimes it sucks, but the law just isn't about making people feel better...

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Moryath]

That's because he has nothing to support it with.

"Allowing both groups" presents the following problems:

#1 - it is unfair to allow one group (the ones who were in the "heightened chance" of the faulty selection process) to have more than one chance to get in.
#2 - it is unfair to deny another group (the ones from the other 28 days' worth of submissions) an EQUAL chance at selection.
#3 - it is unfair to those from other years, who were each given EQUAL chances in each year, to provide a different standard for this year only.
#4 - it is unfair to the US to insist that, because of an error that was caught soon enough to rectify it before any serious harm was done, they should accept double the "winners" from this year (which would undoubtedly lead to a LOWER CHANCE for applicants in subsequent years as they then played catch-up).

#5 - it is unfair to allow there to be two groups of "winners", one set of which had a "random selection" chance from 1/15 of the total pool, the other set of which had a "random selection" chance from 14/15 of the total pool. One group clearly had a higher chance of selection than the others.

So, he has no rational basis to stand on.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Dahamma]

Purely statistically (where "unfair" = "not the same odds") you are correct. But it's all irrelevant because the entire thing was a specific Act with *2* requirements: 1) 50,000 visas and 2) "strictly random". Given both those legal requirements, there really wasn't any other choice the Court could make anyway.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[chaboud]

People wait an awful long time for this, sure, but they often start making plans as soon as they find out that they won. They want to come here, badly. Badly enough to take new pictures and jump through the sumbissions process each year. Within a few days, people are making arrangements, buying plane tickets, giving things away...

Don't discount how much this sucked for those who had their yes turned into a no.

Granted, I talked with someone who was worried that now her brother was going to come to the states. With the results invalidated, she's probably privately thrilled.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[John R. Isidore]

Would it have been terrible to let in twice as many people this year, i.e. the people selected due to the glitch AS WELL AS the people selected by the second truly random lottery? (I know nothing about immigrations logistics and laws, so don't know how dumb that proposition is).

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Dahamma]

Would it have been terrible to let in twice as many people this year

Probably not, but given that it would have had to go through Congress to amend the law that allowed it, the probable result (especially considering the Republicans now control the House) would have been that no one gets in...

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Reversing the lottery was unfair to the tiny fraction who were selected. Not reversing it would have been unfair to the huge majority (as TFA says, the bug was that only the first 2 of 30 days worth submissions were considered). So, statistically this was by far the better solution to be *fair* to the most people.

The right solution has nothing to with math and everything to do with keeping our promises.

The right solution would be to honor the results of the first lottery run and then run the lottery again to give everyone else a fair chance. The people who were told they won the lottery didn't do anything wrong - we lied to them. We need to honor our word, not pawn off the responsibility by blaming "computer error."

Many of the people who received notification of winning the lottery made irrevocable changes like selling off property, turning down other opportunityes, even going into debt in order to meet the financial requirements to emigrate to the USA. Leaving them to twist in the wind because of mistake we made is disgraceful.

That ought to be the real story here. If there is one thing nerds and geeks are, it is literalists. We sent those people letters that told them they had qualified for the immigration process, if we said it and then we meant it, end of story.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[t2t10]

Reversing the lottery was unfair to the tiny fraction who were selected.

Winning this lottery has never been a guarantee of a visa, and visa decisions can always be reversed if it turns out you weren't eligible after all. So, it was unfortunate, but "unfair" is going a bit far.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Dahamma]

So, having argued that it was the right decision, I nevertheless do think is was unfair and completely awful for those who were affected.

As another commenter said - some of these people could have made plans based on this information that would be very hard to reverse. Imagine you got a job offer, sold your house, bought one in another state, and the day before you started they retracted the offer. Pretty unfair. But it happens. Life isn't always fair...

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[superwiz]

I would agree. It does seem like rescinding acceptance because of an unknown computer error is unusually cruel. Certainly it ignores the fact that the lottery winners probably started making changes to their lifestyle and going through the expenses necessary to make the move.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[superwiz]

Not at all. Actually, the fact you state necessitates the opposite conclusion. If the bug was only in place for 2 out of 30 days, then keeping the decision as it was would have statistically only effected 6-7% of overall applicants. That's not *most* people. That's a fraction of people so small that is close to being within the margin of error. Given that the human toll that rescinding an acceptance would cause, it is fairly cruel to insist that this small portion of the applicants bear such a burden through no fault of their own.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[t2t10]

As another commenter said - some of these people could have made plans based on this information that would be very hard to reverse.

You should not make plans that are "hard to reverse" based on merely winning the visa lottery. The visa lottery only gives you an opportunity to apply for a visa, it is not a guarantee. It still takes a long (and variable) amount of time between winning and getting a visa, if you get one at all. The visa lottery description is quite clear about that.

I understand the disappointment, but if someone actually has suffered economic harm from this, it is their own fault.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[JDevers]

The bug was that it only chose FROM the first 2 days, so the disadvantaged isn't that group but days 3-30...aka 93% of the people who were in the lottery.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[rohan972]

Part of the rules is that you get notified of the result. Getting a false positive notification is most definitely unfair.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[superwiz]

Allowing the initial winners to keep the green card and allotting extra green cards to be randomly distributed among those 93% would still be the only fair way to handle this. Even if you make the assumption that distributing extra green cards is somehow harmful to the cause of legal immigration, "fair" means that the party at fault should be responsible for the damages. And since it was the US lottery system which was at fault, the burden should be born by the INS rather than the people who had an increased chance of winning through no fault of their own.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[AK Marc]

That's because he has nothing to support it with.

Sure I do. My opinion. That's all you have against it either. The situation is inherently unfair to some number of people. It can never be fair. I'm justifying fair based on the impact on people, and you are justifying fair based on the impact to statistics. I agree that all your statements are correct, and still disagree with your conclusion. And you have nothing to support your conclusion that contradicts mine. I can agree with all 5 of your points and still disagree with your conclusion.

So, he has no rational basis to stand on.

That you are ignorant of such a basis doesn't indicate it doesn't exist.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[AK Marc]

Say this happened every year for the past 10. Do you now go back and invalidate all of those selections, kick 500,000 people out of the US, then re-hold the last 10 years worth? If not, why not? After all, the process is more important than any individual screwed by a mistake, and all mistakes must be corrected no matter what the cost to everyone involved.

Now don't get me wrong, there is no way that it was nice for any of those people to receive a rejection after thinking they had it. But unfair or unjust it was not.

If you agree with me that it would be "bad" to invalidate the results from 10 years ago and kick current citizens out because they effectively entered illegally (whether the fault of the illegality was theirs or the government's doesn't matter), then you agree with my point. After that, it's all an argument about where you draw the line.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[AK Marc]

I wholeheartedly agree. The "fair" thing would be for Congress to pass a one-time exemption allowing for the initial to stand, as well as to re-hold another for those who were not considered in the initial selection. It would take an act of Congress, but no one ever said considering such things would be disallowed.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That's bullshit. You have to funds in hand in order to qualify for the visa, if the only way to get those funds is for you to sell your house then your advice leads to a catch-22.

Your problem is accepting that a visa can be denied for arbitrary reasons. That's not the way it is supposed to work, the list of disqualifiers, like having a criminal record or some infectious disease is standardised. Technical errors in the lottery process aren't on that list and even if they were, it would still be bullshit because a slavish devotion to rules plus a completely open-ended rule is no rule at all.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[t2t10]

That's bullshit. You have to funds in hand in order to qualify for the visa, if the only way to get those funds is for you to sell your house then your advice leads to a catch-22.

You have to demonstrate that you aren't a public charge; selling your house has nothing to do with that.

Your problem is accepting that a visa can be denied for arbitrary reasons.

Quite to the contrary: because a visa can be denied for arbitrary reasons, you shouldn't burn your bridges until you actually have the visa in hand.

That's not the way it is supposed to work,

That is the way it is supposed to work: immigration is a series of judgment calls, not a series of checklists.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[t2t10]

By the way, the DV program notifies more winners than actually can get visas (among other things because winners may also bring family members, which count against the quota). So, you can meet all the requirements and still not get a visa.

Re:Finally, logic and reason win out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reversing the lottery wasn't unfair to the first winners, it just wasn't beneficial.

Well

[ShooterNeo]

The only impressive thing here is that the judge (or his aides) apparently cracked open a dictionary or maybe even a math textbook to get a basic idea of what "random" means. Unfortunately, the judiciary doesn't always rule on the basis of absolute mathematical or scientific fact, when it is relevant to the case. For example, in the arson trial of a Texas man who supposedly (for no credible reason) murdered his wife and children they brought in arson 'experts' who had no scientific validity to their process at all. A Texas arson expert looks at some char marks and somehow always (whenever it is a criminal investigation) concludes "it's arson". Despite the improbability of every fire said 'expert' examines during his career being caused by a crime.

The lottery system is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

A country going bankrupt making willing potential taxpayers play sweepstakes for a chance to pay taxes.

Oh I forgot, immigrants are a big drain on this countries (non-existent) social support systems.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[blair1q]

Only if they're brown and might vote Democrat.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[BlueScreenO'Life]

So your statement that Asians "have the greatest intelligence on average of any race" shows that you're not racist. Now that's a solid argument.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

However, there is no biologist out there with any credibility who can simply say that human ideas and mental performance and behavior are divorced from our genes. If we let the 'brown people' in, who somehow for some coincidence almost always come from third world countries, we too will end up like the brown people.

You've never read Guns, Germs and Steel have you?

And one final comment before you call me a racist in your replies : the best evidence available shows that Asians have the greatest intelligence on average of any race of people. NOT white people, who are in the middle. One possible reason for white people's extraordinary success in past centuries is that their languages (english and related structures) make their mental 'software' more flexible than rigid asian languages where a new character must be introduced for a new idea to be communicated on paper.

Spouting "evidence" from the Bell Curve are we? Ugh!

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Ruke]

However, there is no biologist out there with any credibility who can simply say that human ideas and mental performance and behavior are divorced from our genes.

Quite true. However, there are credible biologists who will simply state that human mental performance is divorced from race. The last time I checked, it was all of them. No credible geneticist believes that mental performance is tied to race.

Please, please cite your legitimate sources that say that Asian genes are superior. I assure you, I am in the process of digging up my own.

You are a racist.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[ShooterNeo]

A racist is someone who makes up shit for an agenda. Actual facts, shown by hundreds of studies, backs up my statement.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[ShooterNeo]

I didn't say they were superior. They are following a different R strategy which is why they have higher intelligence on average, smaller physical size, longer maturation periods, less sex, and take lower risks. These are all known facts that are both backed up by hundreds of studies and are fucking obvious.

Mother nature determines who is superior, and obviously intelligence is only one factor.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[ShooterNeo]

What is race but a different basket of genes? You, sir, need to actually study biology rather than parroting politically correct bullshit.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[AK Marc]

You are a racist. You identify traits by race and use them to judge all of those people. There is no justifications you can add that will invalidate that racism. If you really believed in genetics, you would be interested in letting in "brown people" who passed some tests. That way we'd get the best genetics from all. But you are just a bigot who claims genetics without racism without understanding genetics or racism.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[AK Marc]

A racist is someone who judges a class of people by race, whether correct or not.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The reason nobody considered the things you say is not political correctness. It is because they are mostly completely fucking retarded.

The USA did better because of genetics? This is patently false, please learn up on genetics before you try to base claims on it. The USA has essentially no different genetic makeup from any other part of the world. Whites have essentially no different genetic makeup from blacks, asians from mexicans, etc;

Dilute our population? What do you call the entire history of America? We would have been doing really great if we were still pure indigenous blood, eh? Or better yet, if it was still just bears and deer and shit.

Countries worse off than the USA, eh. And it is due to their inferior population and such? Or is it because of the flow of material wealth from them to the USA? Have you heard of fucking imperialism? Are you really going to pretend to be ignorant to the entire body of world history surrounding the development of non-Western cultures and countries?

Then you venture into linguistics. Interesting discussion... but you think Asian languages have to introduce a new character to represent any new concept? I could have *sworn* they could, you know, combine multiple symbols. But I guess they don't.

Anyhow, you are bad and you should feel bad.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[trout007]

The big flaw is that raw intelligence is only a very small part of being successful. Hard work, thriftiness, ability to see what products are marketable, ect all lead to success. The reason the USA is so successful is our liberty. People are allowed to try lots of things and fail and try other things until they find their niche. Failure is one of the most important success factors in an economy and biology. Evolution isn't what creates new traits. They are being created all of the time by genetic randomness. It is the real world that tests those traits to see if they are advantageous to survival.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[David Jao]

the best evidence available shows that Asians have the greatest intelligence on average of any race of people.

You have no clue what you're talking about.

I take it you live in the USA? The set of Asians who live in the USA is a very very biased and unrepresentative sample of the set of all Asians. The US immigration system is designed to select the best and brightest immigrants. That's why the Asians in the US are so smart and hard-working. The average Asian from an Asian country would be nothing special in America. But Asian Americans as a group are taken from the top 0.5% of all Asians, because US immigration laws are designed to keep out the stupid people. It's completely the opposite of what you claim.

If you actually go to an Asian country you'll find that the people there are no smarter than Americans. But from your condescending attitude it's clear that you're happy to claim international expertise without ever having left the USA. Try traveling or even immigrating to another country sometime -- it'll work wonders on your world view.

With blacks and Hispanics, it's a totally different story. African Americans came mostly as slaves, and Hispanics have illegal immigrants to skew the numbers. That's why the selection effects of US immigration law are significant only for Asians and not other races.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I am sure you know you are a fucking retard by now. Let me jsut add one point. Let's say that Asians on average have an IQ of 100.001, and white people 100.000, and black people 99.999. If you take one (truly) random Asian and one random black guy, then pick one of them at random. Is he smarter than the other guy? It's going to be 50-50, or so close that it doesn't matter.

And I have to say it again. Your point about language is so fucking moronic. Ever heard of Khmer or Kannada or Kazakh? Most Asian languages have alphabets that form words which are actually pronounced as they are spelled. You are thinking of Chinese, which is far more flexible than English in terms of expression. It just has a limited set of syllables, which in any case are not as rigid as you assume they are. Korean may look like Chinese to you, but it's an alphabet too. Japanese makes the best of both worlds, not that a monolingual git like you would understand.

I am Asian.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

A judgment is a subjective thing; a matter of opinion. A study that determines something factual is not subjective. Therefore, if your metric for saying something is racist requires that it be a subjective judgment, a study confirming something about a racial class that differentiates it from another racial class isn't racist.

"Racist" is almost universally agreed to mean something that is a pejorative based on racial classification. If a properly-conducted study finds something to be predominant in a racial class, such as sickle cell anemia in those of sub-Saharan African descent, saying "sub-Saharan Africans are more likely to have sickle cell anemia" is not racist. Claiming the above is a racist statement, at least in the manner in which the term is most commonly used and understood, is silly. The above is equivalent to saying "Asians have the greatest average intelligence of any racial classification," so long as it is backed up by empirical data that shows the same to be factually true, making it equally silly to claim the statement is racist.

Saying it's racist is avoiding the point that it is factually true, and may seem to those who know it is true as an attempt to undermine facts with an emotional response to something universally seen as a pejorative. Whether that is the intent ends up being irrelevant, since "racist" is such an emotionally-charged word.

The above assumes, for the sake of argument, that the claims of existing studies backing up the average intelligence level of various racial classifications is true. I am not making any claims as to the existence of said studies, as I don't have first-hand knowledge of any.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[AK Marc]

A judgment is a subjective thing; a matter of opinion. A study that determines something factual is not subjective. Therefore, if your metric for saying something is racist requires that it be a subjective judgment, a study confirming something about a racial class that differentiates it from another racial class isn't racist.

It still is. If black people are taller on average than whites, then assuming a black person would be taller than a white person when you've seen neither is racism. It doesn't matter if it's true or pejorative.

"Racist" is almost universally agreed to mean something that is a pejorative based on racial classification.

And prejudice indicates a pejorative prejudgment. However, neither require negative connotations to be correct, and there is no other word for either that doesn't also indicate pejorative. As such, without a replacement word, they retain both the original non-pejorative as well as the current pejorative because there is no other option.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Your.Master]

Baseball teams are collections of people. People also have different affinity for math.

Therefore the New York Yankees are better at math than the Baltimore Orioles.

The logic breaks the same way. Just because race is caused by genes, and intelligence is influenced by genes, does not mean race influences intelligence.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Raenex]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

"Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests performed in the United States have consistently demonstrated a significant degree of variation between different racial groups, with the average score of the African American population being lowerâ"and that of the Asian American population being higherâ"than that of the European-American population. At the same time, there is considerable overlap between these group scores, and individuals of each group can be found at all points on the IQ spectrum. Similar findings have been reported for related populations around the world, although these studies are generally considered less reliable due to the relative paucity of test data and the difficulties inherent in the cross-cultural comparison of intelligence test scores. While the existence of racial IQ gaps is well-documented and not subject to much dispute, there is no consensus among researchers as to their cause."

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[ShooterNeo]

Why wouldn't it? There's whole journals on this subject, and no matter which way the data is massaged there's still differences.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[digitalderbs]

I don't disagree with your post. However,

No credible geneticist believes that mental performance is tied to race.

This statement is particularly ironic because one of the fathers of modern genetics, James Watson, is a notorious racist.

http://www.slate.com/id/2176709/

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Theovon]

People generally get their ideas about race from personal experience, and personal experience is often skewed. If you were white and grew up in the ghettos of Detroit, you might get into your head that blacks have a proclivity towards crime, because many of them commit crimes there. However, this would be subject to selective attention, because in fact many of the whites and many people of every other ethnic group are also commiting crimes there. I'm not even trying to be politically correct here. The fact is that the vast majority of negative things that people attribute to blacks (in particular, but also various latin groups as well here in the US) are NOT a function of race but instead a function of SOCIAL CLASS. (Or perhaps other related things like socioeconomic status, etc.) Even if there is some effect of race on behavior (although what it is is probably 100% neutral), it is FAR overshadowed by the effects of class. The main differences between lower-class blacks and lower-class whites (e.g. trailor trash) are minor cultural things that have only superficial effects on their lack of social graces, education, values, and other things (as they are perceived by people of middle and upper classes). Now, it may be, due to residual effects of slavery or any number of other reasons, that a greater proportion of blacks in the US are lower class, but there ARE plenty of upper-class blacks, and they're no different from the upper-class whites. Dave Chappelle even did a show on this, where each ethic group got to recruit people, and the whites wanted Tiger Woods, and the blacks wanted Eminem. Being "black", culturally and dialectically, is so much a function of where and how you grew up that any effects of race (insofar as there is any such thing) completely disappear into the statistical noise.

I was reading somewhere about the IQ differences between caucasians, Africans, and Asians. IIRC, Asians tested slightly high, Africans slightly low, and caucasians in the middle. However, the variance was HUGE compared to the differences in mean. The overlap between races was far greater than the differences. It's hard to infer anything useful from these minor differences. However, the fact that one average may be slightly different from the other MAY indicate some differences due to genetics, but we have to keep in mind that (at the risk again of sounding P.C.) no one race is superior, but in fact, we're all superior in the context of how we are adapted to the environment we evolved in. There are some differences in environment between sub-saharan Africa and northern Europe, with the most obvious thing being skin tone. More sun requires more protection against UV rays, or else you get skin cancer. Less sun requires less protection against UV, or else you'll suffer vitamin D deficiencies, which lead to birth defects, among other things. Well, sun isn't the only environmental difference, and there are of course random mutations that differ between geographically divergent groups, or else natural selection couldn't have selected for skin color in the first place. One thing I have noticed, subject of course to observation bias, is that although I am white, I have a _slightly_ easier time connecting socially with blacks, particularly strangers. (Of course, there could just as well be something I'M doing that might explain this better than race or culture or whatever.) But in fact, sociologists have documented studies of low-IQ children and found that while a 70 IQ white kid will typically be socially retarded, a 70 IQ black kid will be socially normal. (I don't recall if the number they mentioned was actually 70, but you get the idea.) Among other things, there may be some suggestion that Africans have evolved slightly superior social intelligence. IQ doesn't measure social intelligence, and the human brain has tradeoffs, where all of our talents must fit within some total capacity. If some capability is greater, then generally some other capability is reduced. Personality theories like Myers-Briggs at

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Dr Herbert West]

Well, I see I'm a little late to the party that ShooterNeo (ugh) is throwing here... and I think someone has always pointed out the idiocy of the idea of the US being made of "good genes" that will get diluted if we let "brown people" in (after all, the US as we think of it today is a result of years of immigration/contribbutions by those very same brown/yellow/whatevs people)... and anyone who has studied the history of the IQ test knows that it is a culturally biased clusterf*ck... so I guess the real question is:

What kinda combo mod does this merit?
-1 Flameracist? -1 Racistbait?

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

People generally get their ideas about race from personal experience, and personal experience is often skewed.

Innumeracy is the root of bigotry.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Hognoxious]

It still is. If black people are taller on average than whites, then assuming a black person would be taller than a white person when you've seen neither is racism.

You obviously can't make a decision on an individual case on the basis of a generality.

But I don't see where the person you're replying to claimed you could.

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Hognoxious]

There are lots of characteristics of the body that correlate strongly with race. Bone density, lactose intolerance, alcohol capacity, sickle cell anemia, red hair.

Why should the brain be different? It's part of the body, unless you want to claim it's somehow special by invoking mumbo-jumbo like "the soul".

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[Hognoxious]

Whites have essentially no different genetic makeup from blacks, asians from mexicans, etc;

If it's not genes, then what causes white parents to produce white children? Why don't Inuits have children that look like Zulus? Mate a Jersey cow with a Jersey bull and what do you get? It's not a Frisian calf or a kitten, is it?

Re:The lottery system is a joke

[bogjobber]

I agree with most of what you said. But it is particularly difficult to study race in a way rooted in biology and genetics because race is a not a definition made by scientific but rather sociological factors. You could make general statements about "Africans" or "Asians" because African-Americans and Asian-Americans are thought of as a distinct racial group in this country, but what does that really mean?

Most African Americans are descended from West Africans brought over during the slave trade, but that is not absolutely true. Many come directly from Africa or are immigrants from other countries with populations descended from slaves. And African Americans descended from slaves have assimilated much of their genetic material from whites and non-white Americans for centuries. The genetic material of an African American descended from Ghanaian slaves and mixed with Taino and Spanish (a common mixture for descendants of Dominican slaves) differs greatly from the genetic material of an African American descended from Nigerian slaves and mixed with Cherokee and British genetics (like what might have been the case for a slave brought to the Deep South). A Mexican American with roots in the north of the country might have Spanish and other European ancestors with almost no Native American or African, but someone from the southeastern part of the country might be nearly 100% Native American or some mixture of Native, European, and African. And someone from Peru would have an entirely different range of ancestors. Yet in this country Hispanic or Latinos are generally thought of, at least in popular vernacular, as distinct races.

All Asians are grouped together, but from a scientific perspective you can't group together countries with such wildly different racial and genetic histories. There are hundreds of ethnic groups in China or India alone, not to mention the vast differences between the populations of Japan, the Phillipines, Vietnam, Pakistan, etc. that we lump all together as "Asian." Even reducing it further to South Asian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, etc. does not improve the specificity.

To try and separate the genetic differences and study it scientifically requires a specificity that popular racial definitions do not possess. The definitions we use are much too broad, and with little to no basis in modern science. In order to study it in detail and with proper rigor, you have to remove the common terms and use more scientific definitions. And to do that properly would more or less require us to sequence genomes on a worldwide scale. Certainly possible, especially in the future, but not for the armchair sociologist in today's world.

Makes sense

[rivetgeek]

As much as it must suck for those that wont he first time around, this is obviously the only fair choice. A random choice that is limited to a particular subset is NOT random for the entire set. Only those in the subset would have a non-zero chance.

Re:Makes sense

[geekoid]

frankly, If the sent notice out I think those people should get winners AND the should do another lottery.

Re:Makes sense

[rivetgeek]

If you play a slot machine and the machine has a software glitch that tells you that you won, you don't get the money.

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

They should state that every outcome must be equiprobable.

Re:Makes sense

[vux984]

A random choice that is limited to a particular subset is NOT random for the entire set.

Yes and no.

In this case, only applicants from the first 2 days of the application time were considered by the random selector. This clearly unfair, because its quite easy to predict and even control whether you are eligible to get picked.

However if the error was something more esoteric, like every 5th applicant was not considered by the random number generator, (and we recognize that this is an online system not a phsyical queue... so there is no way to know if your application is first, second, third, etc...) then there would be no way to know or predict or control whether you were eligible to get picked, and the process is still effectively very fair and random because there is randomness with respect to your precise position within the queue.

Re:Makes sense

[Hognoxious]

only applicants from the first 2 days of the application time were considered by the random selector. This clearly unfair, because its quite easy to predict and even control whether you are eligible to get picked.

True, but you could only influence it if you knew in advance that it worked like that.

AFAIK, it only came out afterwards.

Re:Makes sense

[vux984]

True, but you could only influence it if you knew in advance that it worked like that.

Right, but that's sort of the antithesis of something being random.

My point was the alternative scenario I provided still contained a glitch, but there was no way to predict or control who would be affected even if you knew in advance that it worked like that, and as a result it was still random who got picked.

Ones precise position in the queue was random. Whether or not you were within the first 2 days or not isn't random.

That reminds of the early times of spam...

[assantisz]

Anybody else remember the Green Card Lottery Spam all over USENET. Good times. Canter & Siegel...

Well

[zero.kalvin]

Isn't any string of numbers random ? It is just how probable to get that string that is relevant. And whether the output of the generator can be predicted or not.

Arbitrary?

[pauljlucas]

... without definite aim, direction, rule or method ...

I always thought that's what arbitrary meant. Random (to me, an admitted geek) is always in the mathematical sense.

Re:Arbitrary?

[ewanm89]

As a crypto geek myself, randomness means an extremely specific mathematical definition with probabilities and distributions of data, which would be better described in a dictionary as totally impossible to predict.

Re:Arbitrary?

[maxwell demon]

Well, "random" is quite often used with the meaning of "arbitrary". You didn't think that "random access memory" is memory where you can't predict which data you access, did you? No, random access means that you can access the data in arbitrary order (as opposed to sequential access where the order is fixed).

Re:Arbitrary?

[physicsphairy]

Arbitrary does not imply 'chance' so much as 'human discretion'. The sense of random described is in line with the larger use of the word. 'Random' is a cognate of 'run' and its use in probabilities refers to the idea of making a rushed choice. (In which cases, using a badly-cobbled together computer program seems oddly appropriate.)

The problem stated was that "The algorithm that was used only looked at submissions of the first 2 days." I am not sure exactly what they think they mean by "scientific randomness"--obviously, many things in science described as random are not equally weighted. As long as the choice from the first 2 days was itself random, it would still be correct to call it a random choice.

But choosing from the first two days is really the sort of thing that will bias your sample in certain ways--you'll find that people who signed up in the first two days were all avid internet users, for example.

Personally, I do not understand why we would want to admit random people for citizenship in the first case. How about admitting the most educated, or the most hard working? Is the goal of the immigration system to give foreigners a fun casino game they can play, or is it to connect people who will improve our society with the opportunity to participate in it?

Re:Arbitrary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I do not understand why we would want to admit random people for citizenship in the first case. How about admitting the most educated, or the most hard working? Is the goal of the immigration system to give foreigners a fun casino game they can play, or is it to connect people who will improve our society with the opportunity to participate in it?

the manpower needed to process all the applications in a useful manner would be so expensive that I would no longer benefit the US: you get better people, but you pay so much for them that it's better to get 15% of "the best people" for 10% the cost. Just think about it: "I have a degree in Econmics from the Univesity of Quito.". Is ther such a school? Does it have an Econ department? Does it issue degrees in Econ? This might be checked in 10-15 min, but when you have a million apps, it would take over 7000 man hours, which is over 3 years of a standard 40 work week.

Mind you, this 10 minutes would be on top of whatever they have to check already.

Re:Arbitrary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that I know the probability, it probably isn't random

Applicant POV

[digitaltraveller]

This year they also added a CAPTCHA after you've signed in for the results.
So I had a little OMG moment today before the usual let down.

My wife and I have applied every year for the last 9 or so (since they went to internet based registrations). It's always been the same, nothing has changed until now.
In hindsight, since I never applied in the first two weeks I was probably wasting my time all those years which is a bit of a bummer.

I probably should have just went over on an H1-B. It always seemed a bit like indentured servitude tho..

Re:Applicant POV

[maxwell demon]

forced to commute long distances at very high fuel prices

Very high fuel prices? Compared with European fuel prices, your fuel prices are extremely low!

Re:Applicant POV

[ShooterNeo]

Perhaps I should have said at very high COSTS. Fuel may be cheap, but the opportunity cost of a 1 hour commute to work (each way! every day!) is enormous.

Re:Applicant POV

[Anonymous Coward]

Try living in Europe, especially the UK, for a while. Then see what you think of your current "high fuel prices".

Re:Applicant POV

[digitaltraveller]

In Australia. We have a pretty high standard of living here. The reason I would like to move to the U.S. is because I'm an entrepreneur and it's nearly impossible to hire people here for speculative projects. I've did it twice before and anyone decent is 150K+. In a seed funded company that is a huge amount. Also VC exists but they are like the Merchant of Venice here. Also there are a ton of other reasons why even with U.S. litigation madness, the U.S. is still a better place to start companies. Entrepreneurs in SF have it better than anyone else on the planet. U.S. (average) salaries actually look quite low to me. I understand where you are coming from though with the rest of it. Maybe you should move here, it's pretty civilized. #grassisgreener I guess.

Re:Applicant POV

[AK Marc]

Yeah, it's much easier to get into Australia and Australia is just about even to the US for pay equity, and better quality of life. The UK just changed their rules a couple years ago, or that would have been easier to get in than the US and then you could go to any EU country as you wish. But now I'm not sure what their rules are, or where it would be easy for an English speaker to get into the EU.

Re:Applicant POV

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, if you want to go to somewhere in the EU, why waste your time trying to get in the UK in the first place? Even if you had got in in 2006 (before your so-called rules change), you wouldn't be allowed to move to another EU country until 2012. By which time the reasons for wanting to go to a European country may (or in reality, actually) have changed.

All EU countries enforce their national language as a requirement for permanent residence, although not if you just want to go and work. Most businesses in the EU operate in English anyway, as that's how Dutch and Portuguese companies (for exmaple) communciate with each other.

Re:Applicant POV

[AK Marc]

The need of those in the US to get out while they can will not change. The likelihood of the EU being a better place than the US to live doesn't seem to be reversing, and for an American, it's likely they won't know other languages and would need to get UK citizenship before they'd be able to live and work intefinately in the rest of the EU, where they'd be able to mostly get by with English only.

Re:Applicant POV

[Anonymous Coward]

And you think this doesn't happen in Europe??? Oh, it's the retard from below, shouldn't be suprised for someone who has never left his redneck town.

Programming error to make it not random?

[qzjul]

// $gets_green_card = ( rand()/rand_max() < $green_cards_to_give_away / $total_applicants ? true : false); //randomly choose applicant
$gets_green_card = ( in_array($applicant_name, $array_of_my_friends_to_give_green_cards) ? true : false); //choose from an array!


That sort of programming error? what sort of error are we talking about here?

Re:Programming error to make it not random?

[Anonymous Coward]

prng != random

Re:Programming error to make it not random?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're using a ternary operator to return true or false? o.O

Re:Programming error to make it not random?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a ternary operator. It's an abbreviated if statement.

Re:Programming error to make it not random?

[LordKronos]

You might want to look up ternary operator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_operation

Many programming languages that use C-like syntax feature a ternary operator, ?:, which defines a conditional expression

arson

[Anonymous Coward]

you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:arson

[Qzukk]

I think he's talking about Cameron Todd Willingham. The case involved a house burning down with kids inside. The mother was shopping, the father escaped alone with burns.

After the man was executed, Gov. Perry stalled the commission tasked with looking into whether the fire marshall investigating the arson had done his job properly (going so far as to restaff it when the first set of handpicked people started to look like they might not give him the answer he wanted).

The final outcome of the final commission with Gov. Perry's best hand-picked cronies was that the arson investigator used outdated techniques and terribly bad science. The commission was disbanded without considering what conclusions would have been reached by applying modern techniques to the evidence.

stuck at 4

[amigabill]

I just hate it when my random number generator only returns a single value of 4

Even a random selection invalidates the population

[h1q]

1898 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. CXCI. 230 Every artificial or even random selection of a group out of a community changes not only the amount of variation, but the amount of correlation of the organs of its members as compared with those of the primitive group (OED, 2nd ed)

There is no such thing as strictly random

[grizdog]

At least not as far as anyone knows. This is not a scientific question, it is more of a philosophical or even a theological question. If there are deterministic physical laws governing how objects interact, then it is possible to predict anything. Realistically, no one will have the computational power to make such a prediction, so achieving randomness is really just a matter of achieving something close enough to truly random that no one can predict it.

In the Eudemonic Pie, some young iconoclasts managed to predict the "random" behavior of a roulette wheel. Any randomizing algorithm that you can find in a standard library assumes some environmental condition - often related to the time - is unknown. These are probably pretty good assumptions, but the results are not truly random.

The only way we could have true randomness is if there are some sort of measurable phenomena that cannot be predicted. Quantum mechanics dances around this question, and even if there is a state change that is genuinely random, it would be difficult bordering on heroic to measure it in a practical way so as to create a random number generator.

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[Anonymous Coward]

measurement of the decay of atoms in a radioactive mass.been around for years. we know it will happen, just not when, and th

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[Anonymous Coward]

At least not as far as anyone knows. This is not a scientific question, it is more of a philosophical or even a theological question. If there are deterministic physical laws governing how objects interact, then it is possible to predict anything. Realistically, no one will have the computational power to make such a prediction, so achieving randomness is really just a matter of achieving something close enough to truly random that no one can predict it.

Your entire point is hinging on a big "if"... and it's one that science (not philosophy or theology) is reasonable sure isn't the case. In short, there are NOT deterministic physical laws governing all interactions that can be used to generate perfect predictions, even in theory, even with infinite computing power.

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[DigiShaman]

It's random that a random number can be generated randomly.

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking idiot. If you can predict anything then there is no such thing as free will. Read up on chaos.

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[Anonymous Coward]

Re "nothing is truly random", well perhaps not, but to run a successful lottery or game of chance one only has to make it random enough to defeat any attempt at modelling. This is done every day by state lottery games that rely on falling ping pong balls (note: not computerized RNG which have rather obvious problems when large sums of money are at stake).

The Eudemonic Pie crew relied on the fact that casinos allowed bets to be placed after the wheel had started spinning, so that given a couple time/location data points a computer could predict with better-than-random accuracy what octant it would land on. The physicists didn't really defeat the "randomization algorithm", i.e. the ball, wheel, and person spinning the wheel. Instead, they exploited the casinos' sloppiness in running the game.

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[FrangoAssado]

The only way we could have true randomness is if there are some sort of measurable phenomena that cannot be predicted. Quantum mechanics dances around this question, and even if there is a state change that is genuinely random, it would be difficult bordering on heroic to measure it in a practical way so as to create a random number generator.

Actually, there are many commercial devices that use quantum effects to generate sequences of numbers that are unpredictable even in theory. Or, if you're careful about it, you can even use a simple Geiger counter to generate truly random data.

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[razvan784]

There are commercial devices sold as "true random number generators" which use radioactive decay from either a concentrated source or just the natural background. While the average rate of decay is very predictable, the exact times of individual decay events is theoretically unpredictable, at least within our current understanding. Think Schroedinger's Cat. Common electronic noise is also a pretty good source of randomness if processed correctly. Philosophy is enjoyable until one wonders off into complete nonsense, and I wouldn't go into theology.

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[ustolemyname]

Mod ac above 'informative'

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[Bengie]

I would stick with the photon based RNGs. The most popular ones have a light emitter that creates only one photon at a time and it shot as a prism type thing. If the photon has one polarity, it goes strait through and hits one sensor, if it has the other polarity, the photon bends and goes to the other sensor.

Best part about this setup is it has a known and constant bit-rate.

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[Your.Master]

I don't understand what people mean by free will when they say this.

I can't the contradiction between predicting something, and free will. Put another way, I don't see random will as any freer than will based on past events. And those are the two choices (obviously there is a gradient between them).

I can see the contradiction if you add some omnipotent and omniscient creator entity as the one who granted free will -- that's a contradiction because that deity set up the initial conditions and knows the ultimate result. But I also see a contradiction between truly unpredictable events and omniscience, so I think something has to give there anyway.

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[GrumblyStuff]

Thermal noise works. There's other types of hardware random number generators as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[FrootLoops]

Quantum mechanics does not "dance" around the question of the existence of randomness--it very explicitly predicts the probability distribution of various measurements. From that it's just a matter of some calculus to produce random numbers according to virtually any distribution you might want. Measurements of quantum mechanical effects are not terribly difficult, either. Try using a Starn-Gerlach device to get a random stream of bits. I suppose it could be debated whether or not these results are philosophically random (eg. what if one day God offers to predict any quantum measurement before it occurs; is the result still "random"?).

I wish there was a physics competency test required as a prerequisite before you're allowed to philosophize about the universe. So much garbage (like bits of the above) would be avoided. I'm sorry if I'm misreading you, but you seem to have a superficial knowledge of quantum mechanics and an interest in philosophy. It might be worthwhile to put philosophy aside for a bit and work through a textbook on introductory quantum mechanics.

Re:There is no such thing as strictly random

[dkf]

The problem with hardware random number generators is that when they go wrong (which they do, and too easily!) it's typically very hard to detect that it's happened. Moreover, there are some superb PRNGs out there (especially the ones with substantial amounts of internal state, so not the default rand() of most people's C library) so it turns out that the overall best practice is to use a hardware RNG to seed a top-notch PRNG.

Re:Speak English or Die

[flimflammer]

And where would you deport citizens who failed?

Re:Speak English or Die

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Should I be warming up the ovens for those aphasic scum?

Why did they change the algorithm this year?

[broknstrngz]

This is the question that nobody seems to want to ask.

How come the green card lottery worked just fine the
years before? Why did they need the change this year
in the first place?

Re:Why did they change the algorithm this year?

[broknstrngz]

I'm thinking that ALL previous algorithm runs were skewed and they only discovered that this year after the first run.

Re:Why did they change the algorithm this year?

[russotto]

I'm thinking that ALL previous algorithm runs were skewed and they only discovered that this year after the first run.

No, it was a new program for this year:
From the decision:

The State Department used a new randomizer program for the 2012 DV lottery, which turned out to include an error in the process that âoerendered the Randomizer Program ineffective.â Instead of directing the computer to select the winners as they had been re-ordered and randomized in step two, the computer simply selected the entries in the order in which they were originally numbered.

So basically the first 100,000 people to enter won (not quite because of some complications while entering them, but pretty close). How the plaintiffs thought they could convince a judge that this was legally "random" is beyond me; I guess they figured they had nothing to lose.

Re:Why did they change the algorithm this year?

[vampirbg]

Mathematically speaking, 1-2-3 has the same probability as 10-30-70 when choosing 3 numbers from a pool of 10k... It's just that humans don't perceive it as random if they can find any pattern... Also, isn't int true that the order in which the applicants were filed was completely random? The only factor was the time of application, and there could've been two or more in the same second so the system scheduler decided which request to process first...

Re:Why did they change the algorithm this year?

[russotto]

Mathematically speaking, 1-2-3 has the same probability as 10-30-70 when choosing 3 numbers from a pool of 10k...

Not in this case. In this case, 1-2-3-...-100,000 was chosen with probability 1. Human intuition that this sequence was not the result of a random process was correct.

Also, isn't int true that the order in which the applicants were filed was completely random?

No. It was slightly randomized due to some implementation details, but it was certainly not completely random, being well-correlated to time of application.

Re:Why did they change the algorithm this year?

[Vellmont]

Also, isn't int true that the order in which the applicants were filed was completely random?

The point is really more that the applicants can't be predicted with any certainty, and no "favoritism" exists in the system. This is to promote fairness to everyone. Given the system of "the people who applied in the first 2 days are far more likely to get picked than anyone else" If you have a faster internet connection than me, or happen to have one or both of those days off work when the pool opens, or a dozen other things related to the time, then you're more likely than me to get picked than I am. The sample is then biased towards those people.

So I'd argue that that's not a random sampling, it's a biased sampling.

The Emigration of Money

[sqrt(2)]

If labor is to be restricted from freely leaving one country and coming to another, then so too should capital be restricted. If I cannot walk across the border and sell my labor where it is more highly valued, why should the business tycoon on the other side of the line be allowed to set up a factory in my country and exploit my lower standard of living and lower wages? You cannot have an ethical and just system where only one form of immigration is allowed to be effectively infinite and the other is not. The restrictions on capital moving between borders should be similar to the movement of labor. I'd prefer this to be accomplished by loosening the restrictions on the movement of labor, not by restricting capital flow. Letting capital walk the earth freely while we keep workers chained to their place of birth is one of the primary tools of the capitalist elite ruling class and the Global North countries to maintain their hegemony over all peoples. It is directly opposed to the principles of self-determination and progressive philosophy.

Re:The Emigration of Money

[razvan784]

Because it is advantageous for the US to impose immigration restrictions and it is advantageous for the US to export capital. It is similarly advantageous for your government/legislators to accept foreign capital, event if it might be disadvantageous to you the common citizen. I don't like it either, but it's logical. You should be blaming your government at least as much as the US, after all they're solely responsible for accepting the foreign capital.

Re:The Emigration of Money

[sqrt(2)]

My government and the capitalist ruling class are mostly the same group of people.

Re:The Emigration of Money

[Anonymous Coward]

advantageous to whom, exactly? I have far more in common with a poor immigrant from Mexico than I do with a wealthy CEO even though we're both Americans and white. My self-interests line up much more closely with the immigrants than with those trying to keep them out.

Re:The Emigration of Money

[cdrguru]

I'd say it is up to the receiving country. If China wanted to block all further building of factories, they certainly could. If Mexico wanted to make it illegal for poor farm workers to come to the US, they could block them. Instead, Mexico makes it illegal to enter their country without permission and only through authorized border crossings whereas the US by comparison has nearly a big sign saying WELCOME!

Absolutely, we would all be better off if China decided they didn't want the factories any longer and went back to an agrarian economy. I don't see that happening. Neither do I see Mexico deciding not to export their farm workers to the US.

Re:The Emigration of Money

[Anonymous Coward]

When the business tycoon sets up a factory in your country, he can get away with paying you less, but eventually more factories will be set up (unless your country has serious problems), and wages will rise. Industry coming to a country is a pretty good way to lift the incomes and standards of living, regardless of migration restrictions, and has the added advantage that everyone in the country benefits, not just the 10 or 20 percent who are mobile enough to go somewhere else or have family who will do so and send money back. Compare the economies of China, Taiwan, and South Korea with that of someplace like Mexico. There is labor migration from the former three countries, but that isn't what built up standards of living there. Climbing the economic ladder did that - and low wage "exploitation" labor is the bottom few rungs of that ladder. To the extent that Mexico itself is improving, it's also from increasing production and exports locally. Not saying labor migration can't also help, but your dichotomy is false, and your "ethical" concerns are BS.

Wealthy countries have reasonable incentives not to allow completely free labor migration. Mass immigration of poor people, whose lifetime tax payments will not come close to the cost of educating their children in public schools, puts a strain on state budgets. Rising population density will, in the long run, raise housing cost per area for citizens, gradually reducing standards of living. You may think these effects are too small to warrant the reduction in freedom from restricting migration, but it's not a one-sided argument.

So what's "random" then?

[Chemisor]

Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random". The strict definition being that the program to produce the number must be longer than the number, which, of course, is impractical. Pseudorandom is really the best we can do without special hardware.

But even if we could, it is still about unpredictability. Just because you can't predict the output of an RNG, doesn't mean it will always be unpredictable. People find new patterns that may fit your RNG's output and make it non-random. Randomness is not a permanent quality, as you can see, but exists only as long as we are unable to come up with some deterministic explanation for it.

Re:So what's "random" then?

[readin]

Unpredictability is the key, or course. The method that was used looked at only the first two days submissions. Suppose you knew that the computer program doing the selection might have a bug, and that even if that bug were found the results would not be invalidated. You might try to take advantage of that bug by submitting in such a way that you get the benefit. You could submit very early, expecting the bug to pick up only early entries, or you might submit very late thinking it will pick up late bugs. You might spend a lot of time analyzing what kinds of errors are more common.

By promising a "random" selection, the government is promising that you don't need to worry about spending time on such things because they won't make any difference.

If the problem had been something less useful - like the program was grabbing every other entry - the applicants wouldn't be able to predict whether they would be picked based on anything they did or anything about their application - the result would be as good as random.

The criteria of predictability I've laid out makes sense, but it does have a weakness. It is open to argument whether a particular defect is predictable.

The judge made the right call in this case, but his criteria is perhaps overly strict - or perhaps not. I can see two different valid decisions.

Re:So what's "random" then?

[nobodyknowsimageek]

Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random". The strict definition being that the program to produce the number must be longer than the number, which, of course, is impractical. Pseudorandom is really the best we can do without special hardware.

Ah, but you are so wrong. Try a google search on "entropy gathering". There are well known ways to generate truly random sequences without any "special" hardware, using environmental noise collected from device drivers and other sources. There are Linux distros whose /dev/random implementations use these techniques. On other Unixen the EGD (Entropy Gathering Daemon) provides random sequences in a similar way.

See the Wikipedia article on /dev/random for more info.

Re:So what's "random" then?

[Vellmont]

Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random".

Perhaps very bad, or at least ignorant computer programmers think this. The good ones know about things such as "hardware random number generators", which generate random random numbers using thermal noise, which is random at the quantum level. These are built into many chipsets, and are hardly considered exotic. I've got one myself in a cheap VIA motherboard. QM could be wrong of course, anything in science can be. If you think you can predict thermal noise, or some other quantum phenomenon, I guarantee there's a nobel prize in it for you if you're correct. If you're really holding out for that without any evidence to support it, then the conversation is essentially over.

We can possibly debate on whether other sources of randomness (keyboard timings, network latency packets, etc) are truly unpredictable. That's not something I have any special knowledge of. But you're quite wrong if you think that nothing is truly random. Our current theories about how the universe works would say that the lowest level of everything IS random and unpredictable.

Re:So what's "random" then?

[FrootLoops]

To be fair, the GP did say random numbers generated "programmatically" aren't strictly random. Maybe they meant to discount hardware random number generation this way. It's unclear where eg. keyboard input lies, then. Perhaps they meant something like "a fixed Turing machine given as input only how many random integers in a fixed range it should produce--call it n--will only give pseudorandom ones for sufficiently large n".

Re:So what's "random" then?

[FrootLoops]

Whoops, I should have included a length k (for fixed k) binary string in the input to that Turing machine, along with n.

Re:So what's "random" then?

[chichilalescu]

one small question: why do you say that thermal noise is a quantum phenomenon?
I haven't really heard anyone say it before. I do know that the electrons in a conductor at normal conditions form a quantum gas, and I do know that every physical system is a quantum system in the end, but could you point me to a more detailed description of these random number generators?

Kids these days

[Anonymous Coward]

An article on the internet about the green card lottery and not one mention of Cantor & Sielgel? For christ's sake...what short memories we have.

Re:Speak English or Die

[fireylord]

And which language should that be, being as there is no official one.

How good is your Spanish by the way? Italian? Polish? I could go on :)

RANDOM.ORG

[Freddybear]

http://www.random.org/randomness/ has a useful discussion of pseudo-random (program generated) versus "true" (aka physically generated) random numbers.

Does that really follow?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

If there are deterministic physical laws governing how objects interact, then it is possible to predict anything.

Well, for starters, there are objections to your premise.

Then the second problem is your assumption that physical laws "govern" how objects interact. We don't have to accept that assumption; we can assume instead that physics is a collection of predictive theories about the world, which we accept because they meet some statistical criteria.

The experiments that support your typical physical theory don't produce the exact numbers that the theories' equations predict. We don't reject the theories because of this; rather, we use statistical tests to see how well the numbers fit the theory if we assume that they are the result of random deviations from the prediction.

In this case, then, we can support a deterministic physical theory without having to conclude that the world must be nonrandom, because we cannot prove that the deviations that we observe from the theory are deterministic. Such a proof would require yet another theory to predict the deviations, and the experiments to support that second theory would in turn have the same random deviation from our predictions.

Re:Speak English or Die

[Anonymous Coward]

And I want to deport citizens like you...gee how about that, maybe letting anyone deport anyone is a /bad/ idea.

Yes. There Is.

[Greyfox]

Random is demonstrable. Over a large enough sample size random numbers will have a uniform distribution. Unpredictable random phenomena can also be observed in nature. Lava lamps are one of these. When I was in high school in the 80's my Chemistry teacher demonstrated random Brownian motion by mixing two chemicals together and pointing out how the colors changed. I don't know what they're teaching kids these days. Apparently not that.

Computer science spent a fair bit of time on randomness and put it to bed. See also Knuth's Shuffle Algorithm (for fun) and MIT's Lavarand (for profit.) Not to mention the various discussions on /dev/random and how much entropy you really need before you have true random. For starters.

For your assertion that there is no such thing as strictly random, I'm going to fine you one PhD Thesis on why there is not no such thing as strictly random. Get to work.

Re:Yes. There Is.

[Anonymous Coward]

While the grandparent certainly did omit the case of physically-based random number generators, I find it amusing that your rather snide and condescending post refers to Knuth's Shuffle Algorithm as a random number generator. It is, in fact, a method of creating a random permutation given a way of creating random integers. In other words, at no point does the Shuffle generate random samples -- it specifically relies on a black box RNG to do so.

Perhaps you should not be so quick to slam someone for their ignorance of a random (sorry) technical topic until you have finished mastering the details of everything you wish to discuss.

It used to be a sure shot

[ugen]

Back in pre-online application days, Green Card lottery used to be pretty much a sure shot for anyone with half a brain and ability to follow basic instructions.
They had no real form to fill, but rather a set of fairly simple and specific guidelines. You had to use a plain piece of paper, and write in order (numbered or not) your name, date of birth, mailing address, a few other items I now forget. You needed to attach a photo of specific size (with a staple, in the top right corner of the page). You had to mail it in an envelope of specific size (standard US, though not necessarily elsewhere) to a specific address that depended on your "origin". You had to specify your origin (more or less nationality) based on certain rules - primarily your place of birth. You could only send a single application per year.

Doesn't seem so complicated? Well, evidently they used to get about 1 - 2 million applications per year. Of these, well over 70-80% were discarded by failing to follow these rules. People would, evidently, include personal letters and stories, family photos and what not. Quite a few people sent multiple applications anyway.

That left perhaps 300-500K valid applications. Of these 100K "winning" applications were selected and half of those actually got a green card (evidently quite a few people do not apply etc, which is why more were selected).

So, for anyone able to submit a correct application, probability of winning was hovering about 20%, and realistically meant a virtually certain win over a course of about 5-6 years. Since winnings were allocated by area, some areas fared even better. In particular, those few educated persons from some of the countries with generally less educated population could approach a 100% win probability.

The internet based process changed it all. Now any application that is submitted is technically correct, nothing is being discarded and many more applications are being submitted. Probability of winning at this point is quite low (I would estimate it in single %)

And we still have a GC lottery because?....

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day its purpose was to allow scum like Ted Kennedy to wrap himself in the shamrock and go for the Oirish vote.

Why, in the name of God, do we still have a green card lottery?

Government Accountability

[JustinFreid]

Considering that holding the government accountable for official pronouncements it makes may actually be a more important legal value than strictly following the letter of the law, I believe the initial winners should be offered visas. Further, considering that the 50,000 person quota is arbitrary and that there's no distinct harm in allowing more people from this list to immigrate, the government should be compelled to both honor its initial announcement and then to run the lottery again following the court's interpretation of "in a strictly random order".

Green Card Lottery - Final One?

[Anonymous Coward]

Green Card Lottery 1994 May Be The Last One!
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.
The Green Card Lottery is a completely legal program giving away a
certain annual allotment of Green Cards to persons born in certain
countries. The lottery program was scheduled to continue on a
permanent basis. However, recently, Senator Alan J Simpson
introduced a bill into the U. S. Congress which could end any future
lotteries. THE 1994 LOTTERY IS SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE
SOON, BUT IT MAY BE THE VERY LAST ONE.
PERSONS BORN IN MOST COUNTRIES QUALIFY, MANY FOR
FIRST TIME.
The only countries NOT qualifying are: Mexico; India; P.R. China;
Taiwan, Philippines, North Korea, Canada, United Kingdom (except
Northern Ireland), Jamaica, Domican Republic, El Salvador and
Vietnam.
Lottery registration will take place soon. 55,000 Green Cards will be
given to those who register correctly. NO JOB IS REQUIRED.
THERE IS A STRICT JUNE DEADLINE. THE TIME TO START IS
NOW!!
For FREE information via Email, send request to
cs...@indirect.com
--
**
Canter & Siegel, Immigration Attorneys
3333 E Camelback Road, Ste 250, Phoenix AZ 85018 USA
cs...@indirect.com telephone (602)661-3911 Fax (602) 451-7617

Wait? Green Card lottery actually exists?

[mwvdlee]

(not from the US) I though all this "Green card lottery" stuff was just some satirical comment on the US immigration process, turned into banner text by unscrupulous scammers trying to steal money from unsuspecting foreigners. Which retard thought that a lottery would be a good idea?

Re:Wait? Green Card lottery actually exists?

[Anonymous Coward]

These days, it seems the only winning move is not to play.

This web site only supports Internet Explorer 6.0

[thrill12]

I was curious so wanted to check the diversity lottery website (http://dvlottery.state.gov/) and encountered this statement: "This web site only supports Internet Explorer 6.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0.". I guess if you want to take part in the diversity lottery you have to do away with some of your freedoms to make use of say Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari.
Somehow the term "diversity" does not seem to cover that bit :) Makes you also wonder who is the target audience for this lottery.

uniformly random

[t2t10]

It does't say "uniformly random", only "strictly random". Picking a random element from a preselected subset can still be "strictly random", it just isn't "uniformly random" over the entire set.

Re:This web site only supports Internet Explorer 6

[Ksevio]

Or even running auto updates on windows to the latest IE

Lottery should not even exist!

[wcrosby]

Instead of doing the right thing, and cancelling the lottery outright, they've now approved an additional 50K green cards into one of the worst US employment markets ever. Thanks for the gift that keeps on giving from the late Senator Ted Kennedy.

There is no mathematical definition of randomness

[swillden]

While I know more or less what the judge meant, and I think the ruling is good, I also think it's funny that, technically, there is no mathematical definition of randomness.

Our intuitive notion of randomness is, essentially, unpredictability. Usually when we look at trying to address unpredictability from a mathematical perspective, we (intially and naively) focus on trying to ensure uniform distribution. This makes sense, because we don't want any value to be more likely than any other value. But the output of a simple repeating counter is uniformly distributed but not at all unpredictable, so clearly uniform distribution isn't sufficient to ensure unpredictability. So we can apply a bunch of other mathematical tests, such as those in the Diehard suite, trying to find any correlations between different parts of the output stream. When we've verified that the stream passes every test we can think of then we've come as close as we can to a "mathematical" demonstration of randomness.

But that still doesn't give us any guarantee of unpredictability. Lots of deterministic PRNGs pass the Diehard suite -- indeed, that's the primary use and purpose of the Diehard tests, to evaluate the apparent randomness of PRNGs. But if you know the PRNG algorithm and any relevant state (e.g. the seed), then the result is no more unpredictable than a counter.

Indeed, it's probably more useful to look not for randomness not in mathematics, but in physics. Many quantum processes are believed to be inherently random, and therefore truly unpredictable.

Sort of.

The problem with physical processes is that although they may be inherently unpredictable at some level, they aren't necessarily uniformly distributed, which means that some values are more likely than others. This inherent bias towards some values and away from others means that although they aren't totally predictable, they are somewhat predictable, and in a way that can usually be exploited. Further, beyond the inherent biases, the measurement process often introduces additional biases.

We can get really good results by combining seed data from an inherently-random but biased source with a mathematical process that "smooths" the data into a nice uniform distribution without measurable biases. So I guess you could call that "mathematical randomness", but it depends as much on physics as it does mathematics.