Random Walk is a bite-sized email guaranteed to make you more interesting at parties. Join our community of smarty-pants by subscribing here:
“Random walk” is a math term used to describe a series of randomized decisions across some mathematical space.
Think of it like taking your dog out for a stroll, and rolling a die to at each intersection to determine your path 🤔 💭
🤯 “Stochastic”(from Greek στόχος (stókhos) 'aim, guess') and “random” have different meanings — one is for things which can be described as having a random probability distribution, the other is for the phenomenon of randomness itself.
🌐 I first encountered the phrase “random walk” while learning about Google’s Page Rank algorithm, which tries to measure the importance of websites by following the links between them.
👨🏻💻 Robin Li made a search engine with site-scoring and page-ranking called RankDex back in 1996.
He called this process "link analysis", but it similarly ranked the popularity of web sites based on how many other sites had linked to it.
📄 Google co-founder Larry Page actually referenced Li's work as a citation in some of his U.S. patents for PageRank.
Li later used his work to co-found Baidu in China in 2000.
💻 The name PageRank plays on the name of Google founder Larry Page, as well as of the concept of a web page.
Gotta love a good double entendre! 😍
🤑 PageRank is a Google trademark, but the patent is actually assigned to Stanford University.
Stanford got 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for its use, selling them in 2005 for $336 million.
That was today's Random Walk!
✌🏼🤓
Path:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Li
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999