Stochastic

The design of organisations and products Go Premium Making legal contracts a better experience Index — Click ᐅ to expand: Design Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Stochastic
/stəˈkæstɪk/ (adj.)

Of an event, to have a random probability distribution or pattern to which one may assign a probability but not predict precisely. To be compared with deterministic (where one can predict the event precisely) and uncertain where one cannot even assign a probability.

The outcome of rolling dice is stochastic: you know there are 36 possible outcomes, each of them is equally likely (1/36), but it is impossible to determine which will happen next time you roll the dice. Nonetheless you know the probability of a given outcome is 0.02777 recurring.

The price of a stock market index at close tomorrow is sort of stochastic, in that it must be a number and that number must be between zero and the total value of all issued currency in the world, but beyond that it is not possible to accurately assign a probability, as David “25-Sigma-Several Days-In-A-Row” Viniar would — probably? — tell you.