Each year our company celebrates the holidays with a holiday website of sorts. This year’s theme involves different employee submissions coming up each time you click, in a random fashion.
I’ve received a few emails alerting me that some of these things repeat, and there doesn’t seem to be an order. (Of course, that would be the definition of random…)
I sent such concerns to our interactive developer, who responded with this:
Sigh…
This is a random as it can possibly be… There is no other way in the physical universe to generate a random number than the method this website uses.
Of course there is the issue with computers executing instructions heuristically in an unbroken chain from start to finish so nothing they do could actually be random. But I think the same has been said about all of natural processes in the universe… Celestial bodies are too carrying out instructions of a sort. Instructions that are influenced by every other particle of matter in the universe and that are executing on a timeline millions of years long. On that scale the perceived randomness ( the X factor if you will ) truly does appear chaotic and random. A butterfly flaps her wings in Japan and two days later Bernie’s submission appears 3 consecutive times…
Fucking mindblowing.
Wow.
