Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Randomness

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

Randomness is all around us. Many of you probably think that this podcast is pretty random given that you have no clue what each day’s episode is going to be about. However, true randomness is a very different thing than something being seemingly random. While randomness is actually all around us, harnessing it for our purposes, especially in computing, can be rather difficult. Learn more about randomness and why some things that seem random are not, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Randomness is all around us. Many of you probably think that this podcast is pretty random, given that you have no clue what each day's episode is going to be about. However, true randomness is a very different thing than something being seemingly random. While randomness is actually all around us, harnessing it for our purposes, especially in computing, can be rather difficult. Learn more about randomness and why some things that seem random are not on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

What if your perceptions about the past, were wrong. ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day and tonight. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by the Restoration Depot. I've told you before about the Restoration Depot and how they provide a one-stop virtual wellness service that supports the social, emotional, physical, and intellectual well-being of individuals. If you visit their website, you can sign up for courses on a wide variety of wellness

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Randomness is a pretty odd thing. Even though it's all around us, many of the things we think are random are in fact not. And many of the things which are random, we don't think of as being random. So what is randomness exactly? It's a tough definition to pin down but two of the big elements of randomness

are that something cannot be predicted and that it has no order or pattern. This subject can actually get really deep, and it's difficult to get into the weeds about mathematics on a podcast, and I know this because I've tried. So I'm going to limit the discussion to two practical areas, games of chance and computers. One of the biggest areas where randomness is important is games of chance.

The whole point of a game of chance is that you can't know what the outcome will be, and that the outcome of the game is fundamentally random. However, for hundreds of years, gamblers have tried to find an angle or a way to cheat the system by either influencing the outcome such that it is non-random or by trying to determine a pattern or system in the game. The oldest example of this would be with loaded dice. Dice have a long history dating back over 5,000 years.

Very early, people had bones that they would roll to play games of chance with each other. We have evidence of loaded dice going back at least 3,000. years. And even though we haven't found any evidence yet, I'd personally be willing to bet that loaded dice go back even further. The idea behind loaded dice is simple. If you imbalance a die such that it weighs more on one side than the other, then the heavy side is a higher probability of landing down. The outcome is no longer random. Gamblers have spent countless hours trying to figure out patterns and trying to beat the casino. One game that seems like it would be really

random is roulette. You spin a wheel, you toss a ball around a wheel, and it bounces around and then lands on a number. That seems pretty random. However, this is where we get into the idea of determinism. What if you could calculate everything happening on a roulette table? If you knew the weight of the ball, the velocity of the ball, the friction of the wheel, and everything else which was happening, then could you predict the outcome? Rulet seems like the least likely casino game that you could cheat at.

In fact, Albert Einstein has claimed to have said, quote, no one can possibly win at roulette unless he steals money from the table while the croupier isn't looking, unquote. Einstein didn't live in a world with computers, because a team managed to figure out how to cheat at roulette. In 2004, a team managed to win 1.2 million pounds at a casino in London at the roulette wheel in two separate visits. They did it by creating a roulette computer. They used a laser attached to a computer which was worn on the body. When the ball was spinning around the wheel, it would make a probabilistic determination of where the ball would land. The fact that you can place bets while the ball is still spinning is what allows us to work.

The team in 2004 was actually able to keep their winnings after they were caught, because it was found they weren't influencing the game. They were merely predicting the outcome of the game, which wasn't the same as playing with loaded dice or palming cards. So yes, roulette isn't actually totally random. It's certainly difficult to predict, but not impossible. Believe it or not, it's been estimated that at least 50% of the casinos around the world, it is legal to use a roulette computer. Las Vegas is not one of those jurisdictions, unfortunately. One of the interesting parts of something being truly random is that all results are equally possible.

This results in certain cognitive biases when we try to decipher if something is random. If you were asked to, in your head, come up with 20 hypothetical coin flips, most people seldom would put more than three heads or tails in a row. That's because a long streak of the same thing doesn't seem like it's very random. Yet, there is no reason why it isn't. Perhaps the best illustration of this was in the South Africa National Lottery, which took place on December 2nd, 2020. South Africa runs a powerball game where five numbers are selected from random balls,

and then a power ball is chosen. The winning numbers on that day were 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, and the power ball was 10. Six consecutive numbers. Needless to say, this doesn't seem very random. The South African government immediately announced that there would be an inquiry into the matter

to see if someone cheated. There were a total of 20 winners who shared the prize. However, why would someone cheat by picking those numbers, which seemed so suspicious, and that so many people would probably pick. A mathematician did the math after this happened, and estimated that with all the lotteries being run around the world, and with weekly or twice weekly drawings, the odds were about 16% that one lottery would select six consecutive numbers in any given year.

That means we would expect to see the sort of result, somewhere in the world, about every seven years. Six consecutive numbers are just as random as any other six numbers. even though it doesn't seem like it to us. Computers have a special relationship with random numbers. Random numbers are used for many things, but are most important for cryptography and security. The problem is that computers cannot generate a truly random number.

It's impossible. Computers are deterministic. They run programs and follow algorithms, neither of which are good for creating randomness. What they can do is create what's known as a pseudo-random number, which is something I know a little bit about because I actually studied these in a seminar I took in the math department, my senior year in college. Pseudo-random numbers can behave like random numbers, and for most purposes are probably as good as random numbers. But they're not truly random numbers, because eventually the sequence will repeat, and because if you know the initial conditions, you can determine the outcome.

A pseudo-random number is actually pretty easy for a computer to calculate. You start with an initial number called a seed, and that sets off a series of numbers that seem to jump around randomly. Small changes in the initial seed value can result in massively different numbers which are generated. For something like a slot machine, many companies have no problem with a pseudo-random number, because for the time a human will sit at the machine, there's no way they could figure out any sort of pattern. Also, they could just keep changing the seeds based on things like time, and the results would be good enough. For things like cryptography, however, that really isn't good enough. If you can guess the seed, oftentimes based on a computer's clock, and you know how the

pseudo-random number is generated, then you can figure out the number and break the code. This actually happened when a man named Eddie Tipton figured out the pseudo-random number generator used in the multi-state lottery in the United States and won the lottery six times in ten years. Eddie, by the way, was the information security director for the lottery. He didn't hack the result per se. He just knew the inputs of the pseudo-random number generator and how it was generated, and hence knew what the result would be.

These concerns have led to the creation of random number services where you can get access to truly random numbers. The key to getting truly random numbers is to take something from the physical world. The simplest way to do this is from radiotic. If you remember old TV sets, if you turn the television to a channel that didn't exist, you'd see a screen full of static. Much of that static was coming from cosmic microwave background signals,

which were literally produced during the Big Bang. These background radio signals are totally random. There's no way you can predict what they're going to be. The first computer random number servers were just hooked up to a radio that collected static, and they got their numbers that way. There are random number devices you can buy on Amazon right now, which basically do the same thing. The company Cloudflare, which runs a good port,

of the world's domain name servers, and here I'll reference my episode on how the internet works, has several random number generators around the world. In their San Francisco office, they have a wall of lava lamps with a camera pointed at it. The image from the camera is digitized, creating a random number. In their Singapore office, they have a Geiger counter measuring background radiation, and in London they have six double pendulums which are constantly moving erratically with images taken of those. Other institutions which have true random number generators, include a university in Chile that uses seismic data, and the website random.org, which uses the above-mentioned radio static.

Random numbers derived from quantum effects are considered the gold standard for random numbers because they can't be predicted even in theory. Many of these institutions have come together to create an organization called the League of Entropy. They combine their random numbers to create new random numbers, which have inputs from all the sources around the world. These joint random numbers are not more random than the individual numbers per se created by each source, but it does have a higher degree of trust. Even if somebody could tamper with one of the sources,

it would be almost impossible to tamper with all of them, especially considering how they all use very different methods to select their random numbers. Unless you happen to be involved with cryptography or gaming, you probably haven't given a lot of thought to random numbers, and there's a good chance you probably won't in the future. But at least now you know that part of the security of the internet is based on the randomness created by a wall of lava lamps. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson.

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