I think an interesting perspective which surrounds “randomness” is that computers can’t actually generate randomness from a set. There’s always some algorithm in place to mimic randomness, but technically, if you could figure out the algorithm, you could figure out any outcome beforehand.
There are 2 examples that come to mind in relation to this:
- Shuffling a virtual deck. Basically what I said above, so I don’t feel the need to expand
- Spotify’s “shuffle” feature for music (well, any “shuffled” music including YouTube & Apple music). The funny thing about shuffling music is that if it was genuinely shuffled, a lot of times you would get stretches of what felt like “unshuffled” music since that’s how chance works. So music shuffling actually organizes music in disparate orders from the actual order so it feels like it’s shuffled without actually being shuffled.
A lot of what I’ve written is kinda bonus thoughts to what this note is really supposed to be about. My thought is maybe it’s not that computers cannot actually replicate genuine “randomness,” but rather we don’t understand what “Random” really means, and that “Random Chance” & “Coincidence” are just words from a Science we have yet to discover.
♡Sugar☆World☮ 