TITLE: Are small knots generic?
QUESTION [10 upvotes]: A knot in S^3 is small if its complement does not contain a closed incompressible surface. Is it a generic property for knots, meaning that among all knots with less than $n$ crossings, the proportion of small knots goes to 1 when $n$ goes to infinity?

REPLY [3 votes]: Following up on the first comment by Misha: Your question is very sensitive to the model you choose.  I vaguely remember a talk by Ken Millet (http://math.ucsb.edu/~millett/) in which he gave a natural model of knot generation where the generic knot seemed to be a connect sum of $O(n)$ copies of the trefoil.   If you tweaked the model, then the generic knot was the unknot.  
And to reply to another comment above: one could condition on the knot being hyperbolic.  Then the model is more interesting to analyze.  However such a model is "unusable in practice" -- you can't actually generate knots this way because the waiting time is too long.