Preface to the special issue on developments of the concepts of randomness, statistics and probability

摘要

Under a variety of names, and in a more or less explicit form, the concept that we nowrncall ‘probability’ must have taken shape in the mind of human beings since the dawnrnof thought, as a nuance added to the idea of chance (randomness) or unpredictability,rnthough chance may not be exactly the right word. Some time later, the concepts ofrnwhat we now describe as ‘statistics’ and ‘statistically stable’, moved away from the idearnof ‘chance’ and came closer to something else, which was called ‘probability’ and hasrnbeen fuzzily conceived as being, in some sense, abstract and ‘ideal’. Throughout history itrnhas been felt that unpredictability can have degrees, and that it can be measured usingrnprobabilities.