]

From: Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> I'm skeptical of the claim that this minimum spanning-tree is any less random than the rest of the quasars depicted in the Picture linked below. (Given that gravity attracts, at least on relatively small cosmological scales.)

How could one decide, with reasonable confidence?

--Dan

--I'm also skeptical. You need a reasonable preferably-simple statistic, you need to account for the "cherrypicking effect," and you need to clearly describe your reasoning. They failed on all three counts, but did use a lot of adjectives about how they thought their tests were very "conservative." Without any of that, if one had their software which found the object, one could just run it on randomly generated "quasars" data and see how often it found their-quality or better objects -- if only 1 time per 1000 datasets, then yes, this would be 99.9% significant. This might be an expensive way to proceed but would be pretty foolproof.