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polymathwannabe comments on Crazy Ideas Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Following Shakespeare's list when it already existed was probably not random, but Shakespeare's choice of what birds to mention in each of his plays was likely determined by the constraints of meter, rhyme, and metaphoric value, which in a natural language are random parameters.
Edited to add: randomness may have also played a part in the choice of writer (i.e. Shakespeare instead of Goethe or Homer or someone else).
One definition of random is compressible-- it's shorter to say forty birds mentioned in Shakespeare than to list the birds.
I'm pretty sure the choice of writer wasn't random-- Shakespeare is tremendously respected by a lot of English speakers, but the idea of exporting British birds to North America to make it seem more homey seems very random.
A sequence of 40 zeros is highly compressible, but does not look random.
You mean a sequence "looks random" if it's not very compressible -- right? That is, the sequence is a member of the appropriate typical set:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typical_set
Or maybe you meant "looks random" means "compressed already." (???) A zipped file expressed as a bit sequence looks random.
I'm sorry, I meant to say that randomness is not compressible.