ANCIENT traders and modern mathematicians may have been getting their sums
wrong. It seems you can’t get a consistent measure of goods by randomly pouring
spheres such as oranges or grains into a vessel, say American researchers. Their
findings have sparked off a debate about the meaning of randomness.
Since biblical times, barter economies have relied on the assumption that the
same amounts of produce will always fill a container of known volume.
Mathematicians also believed that if you pour spheres randomly and shake them
around enough, they settle down into a maximum density, a state called random
close packing.…
