Aaron Gordon - Does Randomness Actually Exist?

Does randomness exist? Can we even fathom the question? This is an interesting article from Aaron Gordan at Pacific Standard.

Does Randomness Actually Exist?

By Aaron Gordon • August 25, 2014 


An Enigma machine. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Our human minds are incapable of truly answering that question.

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All week long we’ll be posting stories about randomness and how poorly we tend to deal with it. Check back tomorrow for more.

Pick a number. Any number, one through 100. Got one? OK, so how did you pick it?

Humans are bad at creating and detecting randomness. Perceiving patterns has proven a great survival mechanism—the giant, spotted cats eat my children; this berry doesn’t make me sick—so we have evolved to be good at it. Perhaps too good. We misinterpret data all the time as a result of this desire for order. We believe that when a coin comes up heads five straight times, we are “due” for a tails, or we think that the stock market is predictable. It’s maybe unsurprising, then, that humans aren’t very good random number generators. And because of that, we’ve had to make some.

If you Google “Random Number Generators,” you’ll find several on the first page that are perfectly capable of mimicking a random process. After specifying a range, they will return a number. Do so 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 times, and you won’t find any discernible pattern to the results. Yet despite the name, the results are anything but random.

Computers are hyper-logical machines that can only follow specific commands. As explained by a BBC Radio broadcast from 2011, some of the random number generators you’ll find on Google follow something called the “Middle Squares” method: start with a seed number, which can be any number. Square that number. You’ll now have roughly twice as many digits. Take a few of the digits in the middle of that number and square that. Repeating this process is like shuffling a deck of cards. Still, if you know three basic pieces of information—the seed number, the number of digits taken from the middle of each square, and how many times the process will be repeated—you can calculate this supposedly “random” number every single time without fail.

Mathematicians have a word for this kind of randomness. They cleverly call it “pseudo-randomness”: the process passes statistical tests for randomness, yet the number itself is completely determined. On the BBC Radio broadcast, professor Colva Roney-Dougal of the University of St. Andrews says, “I can never prove that a sequence is random, I can only prove that it looks random and smells random.”

All of which brings us to this: Given the limits of human knowledge, how can we ever know if something is truly random?

A FEW ANCIENT THINKERS, known as Atomists, fathered a line of thought, which claims that, in fact, randomness doesn’t exist. The most deterministic among them, Democritus, believed the entire state of the universe could be explained through cause and effect. In other words, he was only interested in how the past dictated the present and future.

Once you learn about pseudo-randomness, it’s easy to see the world through Democritus’ eyes. Rolling dice isn’t random. Instead, the dice are governed by specific, mathematical laws, and if we knew the exact contours of the desk and the force applied to the dice, we could calculate which sides would come to rest facing upward. The same is true of shuffling cards. If we knew the exact height the cards were lifted, the exact force with which they were released, and the distance from each other, it’s completely feasible to calculate the order of the cards, time and time again. This is true for every game of chance, which are governed by Newtonian, or classical, physics. It all appears completely deterministic.

A lack of true randomness would be a huge problem, just like it was for the Germans during World War II with their revered but ultimately doomed Enigma enciphering machine. With its 150 quintillion different settings, many Allied cryptologists believed the code was unbreakable. Yet, because it was a mere matter of rotor settings and circuitry—or put simply, completely deterministic—the Allies were able to crack the code.

Since Newtonian physics has proven resistant to true randomness, cryptologists have since looked to quantum physics, or the rules that govern subatomic particles, which are completely different than Newtonian physics. Radioactive materials spontaneously throw off particles in a probabilistic manner, but the exact time when each particle will be discarded is inherently random. (We think.) So given a small window of time, the number of radioactive particles discarded can act as the seed for the random number generator.

Every time you buy something with a credit card, you’re relying on your information to be transmitted safely across a perfectly accessible network. This is where the difference between random and pseudo-random becomes vastly important. Pseudo-random patterns, like the ones created by the Enigma machine, are messages begging to be read. Random patterns are the cryptic ideal.

A company called PDH International is one of the patent-holders for Patent US6745217 B2, or “Random Number Generator Based on the Spontaneous Alpha-Decay,” the very process described above. PDH International, with an annual revenue of $10 to $25 million, specializes in the “fields of Privacy Protection, Authentication, Encryption and Electronic Document Protection.” PDH comes up with ways to safely encrypt data using true randomness from quantum physics.

BUT BACK TO THAT number you picked.

As with randomness, the more we learned about the precise nature of brain functions, we began to question whether free will was possible. If everything is the result of precise causal chains like the rolling of dice or shuffling of cards, some wondered how we can really be making genuine choices. However, as we’ve learned more about quantum physics, the possibility of genuine choice has been revitalized due to the break in the causal chain. In a way, quantum physics introduced a giant, unsolvable question mark, and question marks are good for free-will theorists. Ironically, quantum physics simultaneously undermines this line of thought, since randomness is bad for the idea that we are actually making rational choices.

So pick a number, any number. Maybe it is random after all.


Aaron Gordon is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. He also contributes to Sports on Earth, The New Yorker, Deadspin, and Slate.

BBC - The Secret Life of Chaos

Cool video on chaos theory as a driver of complexity out of simplicity. As often as is the case, this is from the BBC.

BBC - The Secret Life of Chaos

Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand.

It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia - how did we get here?

In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science - how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?

It's a mindbending, counterintuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea. But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics. Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern.

And the best thing is that one doesn't need to be a scientist to understand it. The natural world is full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into complexity. From trees to clouds to humans - after watching this film you'll never be able to look at the world in the same way again.

Tags: BBC, The Secret Life of Chaos, chaos, chaos theory, science, nature, patterns, math, Professor Al-Khalili, transforming simplicity into complexity, physics, complexity, evolution

Authors@Google: Albert László Barabási on "Bursts"

I hadn't heard about this book or Barabasi's theory of Bursts - it makes sense intuitively, but I would have to read the book to know for sure. Being critical, I need to see the research.

The Authors@Google program welcomed to Google's New York office to discuss his book, "BURSTS: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do"

"In BURSTS (April 2010), Barabasi, Director of the Center for Network Science at Northeastern University, shatters one of the most fundamental assumptions in modern science and technology regarding human behavior. Barabasi argues that, rather than being random, humans actually act in predictable patterns. We go along for long periods of quiet routine followed suddenly by loud bursts of activity. Barabasi demonstrates that these breaks in routine, or "bursts," are present in all aspects of our existence— in the way we write emails, spend our money, manage our health, form ideas. Barabasi has even found "burstiness" in our webpage clicking activity and the online news cycle."

This event took place on June 30, 2010.

Here is the publisher's info from Amazon:

Can we scientifically predict our future? Scientists and pseudoscientists have been pursuing this mystery for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. But now, amazing new research is revealing that patterns in human behavior, previously thought to be purely random, follow predictable laws.

Albert-László Barabási, already the world's preeminent researcher on the science of networks, describes his work on this profound mystery in Bursts, a stunningly original investigation into human behavior. His approach relies on the way our lives have become digital. Mobile phones, the Internet, and e-mail have made human activities more accessible to quantitative analysis, turning our society into a huge research laboratory. All those electronic trails of time- stamped texts, voice mails, and searches add up to a previously unavailable massive data set that tracks our movements, our decisions, our lives. Analysis of these trails is offering deep insights into the rhythm of how we do everything. His finding? We work and fight and play in short flourishes of activity followed by next to nothing. Our daily pattern isn't random, it's "bursty." Bursts uncovers an astonishing deep order in our actions that makes us far more predictable than we like to think.

Illustrating this revolutionary science, Barabási artfully weaves together the story of a sixteenth-century burst of human activity-a bloody medieval crusade launched in his homeland, Transylvania-with the modern tale of a contemporary artist hunted by the FBI through our post-9/11 surveillance society. These narratives illustrate how predicting human behavior has long been the obsession, sometimes the duty, of those in power. Barabási's wide range of examples from seemingly unrelated areas includes how dollar bills move around the United States, the pattern everyone follows in writing e-mail, the spread of epidemics, and even the flight patterns of albatross. In all these phenomena a virtually identical bursty pattern emerges, a reflection of the universality of human behavior.

Bursts reveals where individual spontaneity ends and predictability in human behavior begins. The way you think about your own potential to do something truly extraordinary will never be the same.

Tags: Authors@Google, Albert László Barabási, Bursts, Hidden Pattern, Behind Everything We Do, Center for Network Science, Northeastern University, Psychology, Science, change, patterns, routine, predictable patterns, random, burstiness