Letting Go of Random | Hacker News Reader

Letting Go of Random

bit-101.com

60 pointsingve24 comments

I have, in the entire time (20+ years) I’ve produced music, been against randomness.

I could write an article or maybe a short book on the topic, but basically I think it is super lame.

I am much more fascinated by complexity than randomness. Concepts like least common multiple for example, can lead to wide variation without resorting to randomness.

I am a musician myself (both modular synthesis and stringed instruments in improvisational contexts) and while I agree with your idea (complexity being more interesting than randomness) isn't the issue here also that randomness in the musical concept is a lot about perceived randomness?

True randomness is not too exiting most of the time (except maybe in works simlar to those John Cage made, where the concept itself is part of the work). However a "random" change can be exciting, it can be exciting when you tell humans to act random, or when you bring chance into complex systems.

E.g. least common multiple between two numbers but one is a choice between a set of three.

But you can generate complexity out of randomness. Things like L-systems can generate self-similarity and other kinds of complexity out of a random seed.

In that case I'd say that although the seed is random, the system is anything but random. This also goes for various forms of "chaos games". You make random choices on each turn, but those choices are within a framework of possible choices that winds up producing surprising order.

As an occasional practicing generative artist, I completely agree with the gist of this article, but I think it could use more perspective and historical context, both from the science and from the art points of view. This topic has been discussed and debated by many intelligent people for a long time.

There is a faction of generative artists that make a name for themselves selling randomness as some kind of mystical, magical key to surprise and/or meaning in their art. Sometimes it’s anthropomorphic, and sometimes it broaches the debate over free will. And even if the art is boring, and even if the story is wrong, there might be some value in the narrative…

Randomness as a concept is the color gray. It statistically averages to the middle. Randomness is a tool, it has value as a tool, but like any tool it must be controlled in order to make art out of it, especially to make something that doesn’t feel like mushy gray. Randomness is completely uncreative by itself, but certainly can be used to both mechanically add variety, and can be used to guide exploration of a parameter space and take the artist somewhere they might not have tried on their own.

Somewhat related to this is the excellent presentation "Why greatness cannot be planned: myth of the objective" by Kenneth Stanley which I highly recommend! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI

I'm too deep in randomness to let go. I've randomized most of my lifestyle to remove bias from my decisions. I randomize my to-do lists, my exercises, my next destination...

I feel the benefits this has brought me greatly outweighs the losses. I've gained willpower, novel experiences, reduced cognitive load... More people should do this.

"The result of any sufficiently complex process is indistinguishable from randomness." - A. Kolmogorov [1]

[1] Unpublished email

Let this man in on the Bell Theorem.

> Let this man in on the Bell Theorem.

Not being able to go from here to there, sorry.

Care to elaborate?

In short, it's a theorem proving that quantum randomness can not be the result of local hidden variables.

That is, quantum randomness is distinguishable from some hypothetical hissen classical processes we've yet to discover.

It's one of the big "well, shit"-moments for the early 20th century quantum skeptics like Einstein.

The local bit is important. Non-local deterministic interpretations are possible, eg Many Worlds or De-Broglie Bohm.

Many worlds isn't non-local, it works the same as Copenhagen when it comes to Bell's Theorem. If you're experiencing quantum effects you haven't decohered yet, and it's just bog-standard quantum physics, not a hidden variable theory.

So, it's like TRNG versus PRNG ;-)

Surprisingly, I find the first image (the 10 000 random points) to be one of the most please of the article. My favorite would be the squares with noise, then the 10k random points, then the blue squares.

Somewhat-related question: what would be the simplest (meaning least and/or easiest to understand code), cross-platform, but non-browser way to create a window to plot points and shapes such as the ones in the article?

And is a particular language better suited to those aims?

Processing has been around for ages and is pretty well suited for that: https://processing.org/

Processing

Python and the Tkinter canvas is fairly easy and available. There are lots of tutorials for it too.

   while(u === 0) u = Math.random(); //Converting [0,1) to (0,1)

If that's the purpose, the loop in question does not do it. 1 is still out of bounds, only now only 0 is too.

If you want what the comment says, 1-Math.random() does it very simply.

But Math.random() returns a value in the range of [0, 1), that is it never returns 1.