How to Use random walk in a Sentence

random walk

noun
  • Hoffman’s journey to the moon was something of a random walk.
    — Matthew Guerrieri, BostonGlobe.com, 3 July 2019
  • How does that affect the number of blocks walked, and the random walk formula?
    — Quanta Magazine, 18 Aug. 2016
  • The stable map is to these clusters as Brownian motion is to the random walk.
    — Quanta Magazine, 2 July 2019
  • The notion of a random walk is based in part on the physics concept of Brownian motion.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 9 Feb. 2023
  • This team identified a key geometry idea that unites some random walks and sets others apart.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 30 Mar. 2020
  • Biologists can use random walks to model how animals move and behave.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 30 Mar. 2020
  • The attacker was not known to the victim and was a random walk-in to the store, LAPD said.
    — Stella Chan, CNN, 21 Jan. 2022
  • In mathematics, a concept known as the random walk describes a meandering path that is determined, at each step, by a random process, such as tossing a coin.
    — The New Yorker, 12 Nov. 2021
  • Hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway take you on a not-so-random walk through hot topics in markets, finance, and economics.
    — Joe Weisenthal, Bloomberg.com, 24 Dec. 2020
  • Lessman-Moss has been inspired partly by a weaving program that incorporated the mathematics of random walks.
    — Grant Segall, cleveland.com, 19 Sep. 2019
  • The fixation of neutral variants is random walk, and the time until fixation is directly proportional to population size.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 23 Feb. 2011
  • The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets concludes that there is just a six percent chance that the Tesla will collide with Earth in the next one million years.
    — Alison Klesman, Discover Magazine, 16 Feb. 2018
  • Neutral theory posited that most substitutions were not driven by natural selection, but rather random walk processes.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 23 Feb. 2011
  • Fuller determined that for a red giant, this random walk would see a movement in a random direction at a speed of around 2,200 mph (3,540 km/h).
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 22 June 2026
  • Every week, hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway take you on a not-so-random walk through hot topics in markets, finance, and economics.
    — Joe Weisenthal, Bloomberg.com, 19 May 2020
  • Indeed, his book is a kind of random walk through the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and engineering—all illustrated with winsome diagrams and twisted humor.
    — James B. Meigs, WSJ, 18 Nov. 2022
  • Venture capitalists are forced to become political analysts, turning an endeavor of calculated risk-taking to a random walk down political gamesmanship.
    — Nina Xiang, Forbes, 21 Apr. 2022
  • This happens because, in each iteration of stochastic gradient descent, more or less accidental correlations in the training data tell the network to do different things, dialing the strengths of its neural connections up and down in a random walk.
    — Quanta Magazine, 21 Sep. 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'random walk.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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