# ¶ Random Experiment

Many kinds of investigations may be characterized in part by the fact that repeated experimentation, under essentially the same conditions, is more or less standard procedure. For instance, an economist may be concerned with the prices of three specified commodities at various time intervals; or the agronomist may wish to study the effect that a chemical fertilizer has on the yield of a cereal grain. The only way in which an investigator can elicit information about any such phenomenon is to perform the experiment. Each experiment terminates with an outcome. But it is characteristic of these experiments that the outcome cannot be predicted with certainty prior to the performance of the experiment.

Suppose that we have such an experiment, the outcome of which cannot be predicted with certainty, but the experiment is of such a nature that a collection of every possible outcome can be described prior to its performance. If this kind of experiment can be repeated under the same conditions, it is called a random experiment, and the collection of every possible outcome is called the experimental space or the sample space.

We often perform a sequence of random experiments in such a way that the events associated with one of them are independent of the events associated with the others. For convenience, we refer to these events as independent experiments, meaning that the respective events are independent. Thus we often refer to independent flips of a coin or independent casts of a die or, more generally, independent trials of some given random experiment.

## ¶ Example

In the toss of a coin, let the outcome tails be denoted by $TT$ and let the outcome heads be denoted by $HH$. If we assume that the coin may be repeatedly tossed under the same conditions, then the toss of this coin is an example of a random experiment in which the outcome is one of the two symbols T and H; that is, the sample space is the collection of these two symbols.