People are bad with randomness - when chance is involved people’s thought processes are often seriously flawed - prosecutor fallacy, conjunction fallacy, paradox of the false positive, the Monty Hall problem are just some of the examples in which even mathematically trained minds make mistakes. Random walks, which include series of chance moves, are thus commonly not well understood, but they are present in both real life and scientific research: diffusion of perfume molecules in a room is a consequence of every molecule random walking through the space, photons on their way through the Sun (from the core outwards) are random walking, we use random walks to model share prices in economics, cascades of neurons firing in the brain etc.

 

From these examples we see how widespread the notion of random walks is, but quite often, due to the underlying mathematical description, it is not communicated outside maths classrooms with the excuse “it is too complicated”. Being researchers in the field of Complex Systems, where random walks are daily routine, motivated us to find a simpler, understandable and gamified approach to this concept.

We developed a game with this educational purpose - pure game parts are alternated with explanations, link to websites and references, data analysis and discussions, to let the user learn and become curious about the wider framework.

 

To achieve this technology-wise, we developed a mobile phone app with two distinctive levels with different goals. The first, with the drunkard’s walk, the most commonly used example of random walks, to let the user understand the basic concepts and gain intuition about this movement. While the second, is an application of random walks in cell biology where using the completely different setting, we try to train user to recognize random walks in various settings but also to show how distinctive fields of their applications are.