playground

Randomness

Randomness is key in many aspects of our daily lives. Cryptography uses it to generate keys that are difficult for humans to crack, encrypting your sensitive data. However, with the increasing power of computers and the boom in artificial intelligence, these methods could soon become obsolete. We will need other ways to protect our data due to the growing power of computers and AI...

But that’s a whole other topic in itself. Let’s stay for now within the wonderful world of randomness. So stay with me here, I promise you’ll enjoy it.

Nature also plays with randomness and chaos

Here’s an article from Scientific American that discusses how radioactivity decays randomly and also that over time, the pattern is predictable. With a coin-flips experiment, they explain the parallel of the half-life chance. A fun and safe way for understanding why nuclear contamination fades quickly at first but leaves small, lasting traces for decades that we can predict.

Isn’t that amazingly interesting? Even tho that’s an article for kids, it’s quite interesting to read...

Or maybe I just enjoy children’s books too much, which is also a plausible possibility. The point is that randomness is present in many ways in our lives, sometimes even as a kind of chaos, as in video games or table games.

Slot machines

I thought of giving this computer a task, I wrote a little script to make the images below line up, the code starts at a “random” position, then moves each line to 12 random positions and repeats the movement until all three columns match a picture. It’s kind of satisfying to watch a machine struggle to complete a task, it’s also super silly to see that sometimes it just sits there... and moves wrong.

For sure an artificial intelligence bot could do it easily, but my point is that this silly code can show you that sometimes this task is solved in a just a few attempts, other times with much more difficulty. I tested this a few times and sometimes it gets it with a single spin... I wonder how many spins were for you?

If we go technical, that example is not really random because you can trace back its logic. If you are really really unlucky, you will see the spiners do 1.728 attempts to line up the images. Not really attractive odds if you are gambling... so why do people go to casinos?

There are many reasons and ways to encourage people to enjoy the thrill of chance, even when the odds aren’t in their favor.

Perhaps, looking at the spinners above, you get the feeling that they will land on the correct combination on the next spin because they seem so close... but they don’t. In fact, if I told you that after running this code several times, I observed it solve itself in just one attempt, that might encourage others to see if it can be solved in a few tries, even though you have no control over it and haven’t placed any bets.

With the example above, you have approximately a 14% chance of getting the correct combination in fewer than 300 attempts, but you also have an 86% chance of not getting it.

That’s how casinos make money; nine out of ten times, the outcome won’t be favorable for those who bet based on that logic. That’s also the art of uncertainty used to clear up your pockets.

Here’s a fun thing about this article

If you read at an average speed of 200-250 words per minute, as most of the English speakers seems to do, it would take you approximately some 3 minutes to read this article. Once you reach this point, a custom bug is waiting for you.

Since you landed in this page, a script has being running in the background adding a part of the bug every ten seconds. The faster you read, the smaller your bug is. The pseudo random part of the script has made a weird mix for you, and as its name, it is weird and unique. Beyond the length, there are about 216 different combinations of head, body, tail and/or color.

But, but, but why???

Well, if you know me, you know I like bugs, I was thinking of a metaphor of a bug, dormant underground, at the bottom of this piece waiting for you... creepy yes. It’s my personalized and creepy gift for you. This is the Art of Randomness in all its might!

This is also a personal experiment to see how long people stay in a page, I currently don’t have any trackers here to check readers metrics, but if you found the idea interesting, let me know on social media how long you stayed here.

Thanks for reading. Reload this page if you’d like to see a different bug or if you have better luck with the slot machines above too.
See you soon with more weird stuff.