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Hello and welcome to another episode of Half as Storytime.
I’m Sam, your storyteller, and today’s story comes from one of my very favorite books:
the Rand Corporation’s classic, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.
Let’s get started.
One, zero, zero, nine, seven, three, two, five, three, three, seven, and oh, here’s
my favorite part: six.
I know—pretty good story, right?
What makes this book so great is that these days, stories are so predictable—we know
the couple will always reunite, the underdog will always win, and the talented chef will
always be secretly controlled by a rat that’s under his hat.
With this book, though, it’s impossible to accurately guess what will happen next,
because that’s the whole point; its pages are filled with one million numbers that are
more random than a tween on Tumblr in 2009.
If you’re wondering why anybody would print, let alone buy, a book of a million random
numbers, I’d first remind you that they sold millions of copies of Twilight retold
from the vampire’s perspective.
People will read literally anything, and also, they’ve gotten at least one sale from someone
making an educational YouTube video, but mostly, there are a number of reasons that someone
might need random numbers.
The most significant would be for random sampling because, of course, in order to take a random
sample, after all, you need random numbers.
Say an engineer, for example, was tasked with inspecting welds on an old bridge.
Checking just the first few would make it more likely to miss a problem, and checking
all of them would take far too long to be done regularly, so they might use this book
to get random numbers to pick a truly random sampling of welds to inspect, ensuring that
the only thing that could harm the bridge would be decades of political gridlock on
infrastructure funding.
In addition to this, pollsters, experimental researchers, and plenty of other people need
random numbers to perform their job, or you might need them for other things such as cryptography,
electronic gambling machines, Monte Carlo simulations, random jury selections, and deciding
which of your friends you’re going to frame for tax evasion as a TikTok prank.
But of course, you probably have a big question: why do people need to pay $68, or $54.40 for
a limited time, for a book of random numbers?
I mean, couldn’t a person just sit down and come up with some random numbers by themselves?
After all, that’s what the president did when he filed his tax returns—and yes, George
Soros did pay me to tell that joke.
It turns out, however, that researchers have conducted studies on this very question of
whether humans can be truly random and came to the same conclusion as every other study
on human cognition: no, of course we can’t, because people are idiots—especially you,
yes you, in particular.
In this case, it turned out that when people are asked to list off digits randomly, we
all end up saying one way too often and almost completely forget about five.
So, basically, humans have innate biases that lead us to supposedly randomly pick certain
numbers more than others.
That means that if it was down to human randomness, the fifth weld on the bridge might never get
inspected.
To solve this problem, enter the RAND Corporation, a charmingly shadowy think tank full of big
smart brains that mainly consults for the US armed forces, because after all there’s
nothing more random than the US’ foreign policy decisions.
Back in 1947, the Douglas Aircraft Company provided them with a machine that would register
random fluctuations in voltage in a vacuum-tube machine into simple strings of ones and zeroes.
Because it was the 1950s and computers still had the processing power of an inbred potato,
they had to do a bunch of complicated stuff to convert these strings into numbers—a
circuit board converted the ones and zeroes into digits from zero to nine, which another
machine turned into punch cards, fed into an IBM data-processing machine, read a bedtime
story, and then finally put into this book.
Despite its massive popularity in the late 20th century, these days, the book is somewhat
obscure—just like switchboard operators, video rental stores, and all of my free time,
it has been overtaken by computers.
Now, computers’ semi-random number generation works fine for pollsters, engineers, and statisticians,
but for certain applications, like gambling machines, using computers as random number
generators is still pretty fraught, because computers are deterministic.
In other words, computers are only capable of doing exactly as their programming tells
them, meaning they can never actually create true randomness.
Of course, you can write an algorithm to spit out a bunch of seemingly random numbers, but
they won’t really be random—not, like, legit, authentic, non-GMO random.
That’s because they’ll be determined by that algorithm, and if someone can recreate
the algorithm, they can predict your random numbers faster than today’s Reddit memes
can predict tomorrow’s Instagram memes.
In fact, there’s a Russian man, named some Russian name, who has reverse-engineered the
pseudo-random number generator of a number of slot machines, and used that information
to steal millions from casinos.
True randomness, then, has to be based on some sort of actual, real-world physical object
or phenomenon that exhibits randomness, like Geiger counters, lightning storms, lava lamps,
or a teenager’s emotions.
Recently, the million-digit book has come under scrutiny after a Rand engineer, Gary
Briggs, was in Covid quarantine and had already finished Tiger King, and so did what any rational
person would do and spent his free time reverse-engineering the process that converted the original strings
of ones and zeroes into the digits 0 through 9, and found that a few translation errors
were made, likely when someone dropped, and then switched, a few of the punch cards used
by the old-timey IBM machines.
The good news is, the numbers are still definitely random, just a few are in the wrong order
of random.
The bad news is, though, that Gary Briggs is still definitely a huge nerd.
The thing about nerds, though, is that these days, being a nerd is cool—just ask Bill
Gates, or Jimmy Neutron, or that total dork over at Wendover Productions—so if you’re
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