Rnaodm Nmbeurs
From Maze
10 PRINT CHR$(109.5+RND(1));:GOTO 10
Random - Let’s connect the social usage of the word and its mathematical senses. We can investigate why RND became a key component of the Maze program.
Randomness so easily accesses our emotions.
As observant creatures, we remember and perceive, combing through one another's experiences and stories to thrive. Randomness can be a cause for celebration, particularly when combined with generosity, such as when one “practices a random act of kindness.” Just the right amount of randomness transports a blues jam deeper into the heart or sparks a an encounter between strangers. Sometimes, it is not merely a single random event, but an accumulation of them which really makes the world run.
Consider blues music - a genre which in contrast to classical music invites and welcomes improvisation. Imagine a typical evening's performance, a guitarist onstage, struggling to connect his inner feelings with the motion of his hands and the sound his instrument produces. As playing gets more intense, the body couples ever more tightly to the instrument, and perhaps due to a bit of perspiration, a brief index finger slip near the 14th fret leads to a “wrong note” which the player's and listeners' ears quickly detect. Yet, the skilled player perceives it not as "wrong note," but as an unexamined slice of his story, and incorporates the new pitch into the song. Two shy listeners observe the whole sequence, and it delights them. When they simultaneously smile, they mutually recognize the expressions from the corners of their eyes and take it as a cue to move closer together. In their first conversation, one of them reveals, "I wasn't even supposed to be here, I took the wrong train. It was an accident..." Their conclusion is that fate brought them together. While their biological systems may have primed them for the experience, it was the accumulation of random events which produced the perceptible event.
Randomness heightens every other emotion, because it obscures perception, and mandates further observation and investment. When scientific predictions are made, such as whether a meteor will destroy the planet, or whether a new drug will help people, surveys are made, and noise, or random events must be separated. In a medical survey, a large number of people's observations are recorded, and the results discard if it turns out the someone was unable to follow the protocol exactly due to a random event, such as their car breaking down and they were unable to get the medicine.
Every stage of data manipulation which leads the investigator closer to the answer require more time and resources, and potentially affects more people. Yet, even after a final answer has been committed, undissolved randomness may lurk. Consider the use of SSRIs on the depressed. Before 1997, they were believed to be safe for those under 18 to take. However, an accumulation of suicides suggested that maybe some more factors may make the drugs unsafe. This mechanism remains unknown - it is still a random factor, or accumulation of them.
A desperate detective tracking down a murderer has faith in patterns underlying assembled evidence. When the seemingly random events are destroyed, the killer is caught, and frustration turns to joy as the randomness disappears. A jury must be discarded if a randomly-selected jury member has a random connection to those in the case.
compared to sin() it's not a murmur, we wouldn't expect anything to arise from it.
function as straws breaking camel's backs
randomness implies a relationship between expectation and surprise, a violation of anticipation as well as a notion of temporariness. This notion of violated predictability is key to some musicians playing and composing styles, leading to many attempts at “generative music,” most of which fail in comparison to prerecorded music.
With so many variables in the real world like late buses, misdialed numbers, and slippery fingers dropping grilled cheese sandwiches into french fry oil (the origin of the Monte Cristo sandwich!), one of random's opposites, order, becomes a valued commodity. Clocks, calendars, safety standards, and style guides suffuse our culture to protect us.
patterns are especially valued because they are so rare.
The appropriation of the term by computer scientists in which a particular sense of the word was rolled, kneaded out, and baked at 350 degrees for 21 minutes. in the 1940s, who could have anticipated that “random” would become a teenager’s slang term? You can read this in the 140+ defintions of the word on the website http://urbandictionary.
Yet, in a computer, it is quite the opposite. Computer chips differ greatly from the outer world in their orderliness. Unlike our beaches or the bumpy landmasses with weather on which we build our houses, the world inside chips is meticulously fabricated, symmetrical, isolated and predictable. In fact, its basis is one massive crystal grown from purified silicon. It is so perfect that it is difficult to create unanticipated behavior.
The internal orderliness is at least true for the chip (MOS6510) running the Commodore 64’s BASIC interpreter, as well as the chip running the original BASIC interpreter at Dartmouth. As randomness transitioned from the sublime concept it once possessed to the practical application of security, sections of chips were designed to encourage random amounts heat energy to influence their silicon junctions to hasten the creation of unpredictable data. This is part of the essence of encryption - the production of obscurata. Patterns in these data are way behind the abilities of humans to predict in our heads, and are even difficult for many computers to suss out.
In my own memories from 1984 and beyond, RND was most often used to improve the quality of games. For example, in the endless clones of Breakout!, RND chose where the ball would drop into the game, how much it would wiggle through the air, and helped make the sound of the bricks exploding. It made the game a little bit different each time and more challenging. You might wish to try my modern interpretation of my bricks exploding routine: 5 for i=0 to 24: read a : poke 54272+i,a : next 6 data 5,17,29,34, 45,29,23,100, 39,234,255,12, 100,101,102,103, 40,20,10,5, 0,0,0, 255, 10 poke 54274 + rnd(0)*2,rnd(0)*256 : goto 10 This usage was nearly identical to the usage offered in the example programs from Dartmouth in the first version of BASIC in 1964. This shows that random is a kind of "spice," or source of variation. For all of these reasons, computer scientists continue to challenge themselves to produce more random number generators.
Interestingly, we still can detect patterns within it, using computers, but our perception is poor at recognizing randomness because we continuously attempt to find patterns in it.
In the last 10 years, the word random has taken on an additional connotation of "worthless" or "boring". Patterns are so important, that random events, such as a murder or terrorist act, sounds scary or pointless.
What's interesting about 10print... is that the program functionality or quality of the random number generator has almost no influence on its maze qualities. You can try running it with other random number generators, see listing X, which uses the C64's sound chip as a random number generator instead of BASIC's. In order to appear as a maze, the value must
10 PRINT CHR$(109.5+RND(ti));:GOTO 10 10 print chr$(109.5+rnd(ti));:goto 10 10 print chr$(109.5+(1andti));:goto 10
In 10 PRINT CHR$(109.5+RND(1));:GOTO 10, the RND command (pronounced “random”) modulates the output in a stunning way. Compared to the maze pattern program which forms the title of this book, you can imagine how boring the following program would be: 10 PRINT CHR$(109); : GOTO 10 In fact, here’s a demonstration of it: (pic109.jpg)
or possibly 10 PRINT CHR$(110); : GOTO 10
pic110.jpg
Do other simple programs besides 10 Print... promise more interesting patterns? One might consider switching printing every Nth block as one possibility, or, more adventurously, using a chaotic system with feedback... but none of these patterns are encapsulated into this single three-letter command which is built into the operating system: RND. What does it really mean?
It is hypothesized that the RND function in the titular program Of course, RND is an abbreviation for the word random. Random
