Randomness
From Maze
(Difference between revisions)
(→Works Cited) | (Jackson Mac Low and A Million Random Digits) | ||
| Line 54: | Line 54: | ||
<blockquote>The tables of random numbers in the book have become a standard reference in engineering and econometrics textbooks and have been widely used in gaming and simulations that employ Monte Carlo trials. Still the largest known source of random digits and normal deviates, the work is routinely used by statisticians, physicists, polltakers, market analysts, lottery administrators, and quality control engineers. (RAND Corporation)</blockquote> | <blockquote>The tables of random numbers in the book have become a standard reference in engineering and econometrics textbooks and have been widely used in gaming and simulations that employ Monte Carlo trials. Still the largest known source of random digits and normal deviates, the work is routinely used by statisticians, physicists, polltakers, market analysts, lottery administrators, and quality control engineers. (RAND Corporation)</blockquote> | ||
| + | |||
| + | It would likely detract from the weighty aura of ''A Million Random Digits'' if the RAND Corporation revealed that its tables were also used by poets and artists, most notably Jackson Mac Low, who often turn toward ''A Million Random Digits'' to generate chance operations whose sophistication far outstripped Tzara's hat. "Converging Stanzas," for example used ''A Million Random Digits'' to generate the structures of sixty stanzas, randomly populated with words from the 1930 850-word ''Basic English Word List'' (Mac Low 236). Mac Low's "Sade Suit" similarly used playing cards and ''A Million Random Digits'' to rewrite the Marquis de Sade (46). | ||
Considering its sophisticated origins and uses, ''A Million Random Digits'' suggests a surprisingly unscientific method of using its tables: "In any use of the table, one should first find a random starting position. A common procedure for doing this is to open the book to an unselected page of the digit table and blindly choose a five-digit number" (RAND). Once again, it's randomness all the way down. This seemingly benign instruction aside, the RAND report ominously explains that its one million random numbers were originally “prepared in connection with analyses done for the United States Air Force” (RAND Corporation). Like so many other advances in computing, randomness, it turns out, is intimately linked to Cold War military strategies. In fact, most of the early work on computer-based random number generation was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (see, for example, Rotenberg’s work in the late fifties) or the U.S military (such as Green et al’s work at MIT, with joint support of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force). | Considering its sophisticated origins and uses, ''A Million Random Digits'' suggests a surprisingly unscientific method of using its tables: "In any use of the table, one should first find a random starting position. A common procedure for doing this is to open the book to an unselected page of the digit table and blindly choose a five-digit number" (RAND). Once again, it's randomness all the way down. This seemingly benign instruction aside, the RAND report ominously explains that its one million random numbers were originally “prepared in connection with analyses done for the United States Air Force” (RAND Corporation). Like so many other advances in computing, randomness, it turns out, is intimately linked to Cold War military strategies. In fact, most of the early work on computer-based random number generation was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (see, for example, Rotenberg’s work in the late fifties) or the U.S military (such as Green et al’s work at MIT, with joint support of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force). | ||
