I thought was explicity saying that I was not referring to you about my comments on homework.
I don't have a specific book in mind, but you might want to browse the tables of contents from a few books on simulation algorithms.
I'm not sure how to distinguish between random results and a coincidence. Al posted in one of these threads a list of seemingly unlikely patterns in the digits of pi. I'm reminded of a Fermi's statement that "A miracle is anything with a probability of less than 10%."
So maybe if we set a monkey at a typewriter and check in every googol years, we find he has not produced the collected works of William Shakespeare. Maybe he has only produced a single Sonnett. Is it any less curious?
What I think is that language is necessarily vague. There's a lot of things that we communicate (even to ourselves) of which we aren't necessarily aware. It seems likely (certain) to me that we have a lot of assumptions about the implications of randomness, vis a vis expected values that might not be warranted if we just calculated.
