A Good and SIMPLE Measure of Randomness

Question

What is the best algorithm to take a long sequence of integers (say 100,000 of them) and return a measurement of how random the sequence is?

The function should retu

Answer 1

"How random is this sequence?" is a tough question because fundamentally you're interested in how the sequence was generated. As others have said it's entirely possible to generate sequences that appear random, but don't come from sources that we'd consider random (e.g. digits of pi).

Most randomness tests seek to answer a slightly different questions, which is: "Is this sequence anomalous with respect to a given model?". If you're model is rolling ten sided dice, then it's pretty easy to quantify how likely a sequence is generated from that model, and the digits of pi would not look anomalous. But if your model is "Can this sequence be easily generated from an algorithm?" it becomes much more difficult.