https://doi.org/10.1140/epjqt/s40507-022-00158-7
Research
Creating and detecting specious randomness
1
Ericsson AB, Stockholm, Sweden
2
Department of Applied Physics, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Received:
19
October
2022
Accepted:
28
December
2022
Published online:
30
January
2023
We present a new test of non-randomness that tests both the lower and the upper critical limit of a 
-statistic. While checking the upper critical value has been employed by other tests, we argue that also the lower critical value should be examined for non-randomness. To this end, we prepare a binary sequence where all possible bit strings of a certain length occurs the same number of times and demonstrate that such sequences pass a well-known suite of tests for non-randomness. We show that such sequences can be compressed, and therefore are somewhat predictable and thus not fully random. The presented test can detect such non-randomness, and its novelty rests on analysing fixed-length bit string frequencies that lie closer to the a priori probabilities than could be expected by chance alone.
Key words: Randomness / Randomness test / Data compression
© The Author(s) 2023
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