Unpredictable strings are collectives (Q1120569)

The author previously defined the notion of an ``inference method'' which given a finite binary string guesses its continuation. He showed that a special class of these methods could be used to construct a very general theory of confirmation. In this paper the author investigates the class of strings which are unpredictable with respect to these inference methods, that is, infinite strings for which, given any initial segment, a given inference method will guess its continuation incorrectly. It is shown that such unpredictable strings are also what von Mises called ``collectives'' (where the ambiguity in von Mises' definition is appropriately resolved). Thus strings which are unpredictable are also statistically random.