This could be how the Infinity Gauntlet decided your fate.
If you wanted to perfectly balance the universe,
how would you go about deciding who lives and who dusts?
If you were Thanos, whatever decisions are being made
have to originate in this thing,
and I think the Infinity Tech that chooses the fates
of trillion is something that can be perfectly scienced
as all thing should be.
(upbeat dance music)
Ooh, acronyms!
Okay, so you know the score.
The Mad Titan, Thanos, successfully obtained
all the Infinity Stones and used them to wipe out half
of all life in the universe,
or at least all the sentient creatures
or just the creatures living in civilizations,
he wasn't too clear on that.
Anyway, what matters is that it happened.
Striking superheroes and civilians alike apparently randomly
but how could the Infinity Gauntlet
make so many random decisions on such an enormous scale?
And how could Thanos be sure it was perfectly random
and therefore balanced?
And don't worry, there are no spoilers
for Avengers: Endgame in this video.
To get at the statistics of the snap,
first, we need to know what randomness is
and very basically speaking, an event or sequence of events
will be random if they unfold over time with no pattern
or predictability and no knowledge before those events
will help you determine what happens after those events.
It's like if this show suddenly stop following the pattern
that we've been following for a quarter thousand episodes,
then my entire chain of reasoning
would start to feel random.
(screams)
Stay away from me!
I'm immortal.
But what feels random to our minds
isn't always truly random.
Take a moment and decide for yourself
which one of these distribution of dots
is actually randomly distributed.
I would guess that there isn't a vast majority of you
that picked one over the other and that's kind of my point.
Well, the dots on the right are the ones that are random.
To many of us, the dots on the left
feel intuitively more random,
and I think that's because of the nice even spacing
but in reality, which is often disappointing,
nature allows for lumpy, messy data like this,
like the dots on the right, which are truly random,
and maybe this is because we evolve to see patterns
in everything, in faces, in the clouds, and that means
sometimes randomness, true randomness doesn't feel random.
(static buzzing)
For example, if you've ever hit the random shuffle button
on your music service of choice,
you've probably been pretty satisfied
with the song selection bouncing
from albums and artists, et cetera,
(rock music)
but you know this isn't truly random.
There are rules put in place that won't allow
for the exact same Katy Perry song
to play four times in a row
which randomness would allow for.
Even the fun little website that's supposed to assign you
a fate from Thanos you know is only appearing random.
It's looking at your data and using a simple algorithm
to give you a fun little answer or not.
My point is is that most of the apparent randomness
you interact with on a day-to-day basis,
whether it be this website or enemy AI in a video game,
is only pseudorandomness.
And pseudorandomness is simply not good enough for Thanos
if he is deciding the fate of trillions, oh.
Though I've made true randomness sound elusive so far,
you can get at it with simple methods.
For example, every time you flip a coin, a trillion little
variables come together to give you a random heads or tails.
Lucky!
Maybe the coolest example of extracting randomness
from a physical process like this is the Lavarand technology
which is a system of cameras that takes pictures of dozens
of different lava lamps and extracts random data
from the positioning of all the randomly moving globules.
It then uses, cryptographically speaking, all of that data
to secure literally 10% of the Internet's traffic,
but the Infinity Gauntlet doesn't have time
to make a million coin flips, oh, sorry,
or take many, many pictures of lava lamps,
it would take way too long,
instead, the Infinity Gauntlet should
tap into the randomness of the universe.
On the smallest scales, nature appears truly random.
It is impossible to predict, for example,
the exact positioning and timing
of the emission of a particle from a radioactive atom,
and it's impossible to predict
the exact wiggling of an electron
as it passes through something like an electrical circuit.
If the Infinity Gauntlet could measure and implement
randomness like this, then it's deciding process could,
in theory, be perfectly random and therefore perfectly
balanced as all thing should be,
and the very cool thing is we already made a device
that does exactly this.
Oops, I had to set it to backwards,
gotta turn it forwards, oh.
And there we go.
Our sciencey suggestion is that
the Infinity Gauntlet is actually also a RNG,
a random number generator able to use true randomness
to divide the MCU in two.
A true random generator or a TRNG is a device
that generates random numbers, duh, but does so with
those fundamentally random processes in nature
that we mentioned instead of those pseudorandom algorithms
that curate your Katy Perry playlist.
You can make a basic TRNG with something as simple as
a source of radiation, a Geiger counter and a computer.
Our Geiger counter will measure
those random emissions of particles
from the source of radiation
and then all our computer has to do
is assign some data values to those measurements.
Maybe just a string of zeros and ones
and now you have that string of fundamentally random data
that you could use in cryptography or whatever.
Now obviously the whole process isn't this simple,
there are programs and corrections and bias involved
but it works.
The tech industry has already taken what works
in principle and turned it into product.
Here is a true random number generator from QuintessenceLabs
and it measures thermal noise in itself.
It measures the tiny random wiggling of electrons
throughout electrical circuits to generate
a string of random numbers that can be used to for example
secure international bank transactions over the internet.
These things only cost a few thousand bucks
and you could buy one right now
though you probably won't have much use for it
unless you work in something like cryptography,
still costs way less than this thing.
(screams)
Okay, so we have true number generators.
How does this all apply to the snappening?
Well, if Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet
could tap into a source of true randomness in the universe
and then turn that randomness into data,
they could assign all of that data
to all of the potential piles of dust across the universe
and then make the big decision.
Now, despite what I said earlier
the chance of getting a heads or tails
with a single coin flips is not 50-50.
Depending on how the coin is made
and how the coin flips in the air
on whatever planet you're on, et cetera.
The percentage of heads or tails that you get
can be very skewed and not 50-50.
However if you flip the coin enough times,
all those little variations start to cancel each other out
and you go from skewed to a nice 50-50.
If the Infinity Gauntlet is generating billions
or even trillions of say zeros and ones,
then it would also tend towards being perfectly balanced
because in a long enough string of random numbers,
those numbers tend towards having the same number
of all possible digits in our case
in equal number of zeros or in equal number of ones.
And this fact could help Thanos achieve his goal.
Hey, hey don't try it.
We talked bat this, you can't go in there.
You can't go in there.
Here is what I'm suggesting.
Among other things, the Infinity Gauntlet acts
as an obscenely powerful random number generator
and it might work something like this.
The Mind Stone first starts generating
a long random string of zeros and ones,
billions or trillions of them.
It then assigns those zeros and ones perfectly
to all of the potential candidates of the snap.
Once the numbers have been assigned,
the Power Stone does the deed and dusts half of them.
Of course, this effect would have to reach
across all of time and space
but hey this is the Infinity Gauntlet,
if it can make a metal glove actually snap, it can do this.
But reality is often disappointing
because making an infinity RNG
is a bit more complicated than this.
(ominous music)
The first complication is where the gauntlet
is sampling this randomness from.
This thing has to decide somehow
but this isn't that big of a problem.
If the MCU, already allows some characters like Ant-Man
to access the quantum mechanical fabric of the universe
where things are fundamentally weird
and more important random then there's no reason to believe
that something like the Infinity Gauntlet
couldn't also tap into this fabric of the universe.
Hey man, we talked about this.
Another problem with random number generation
is the RNG itself.
Because of how it's made or how it functions,
it can be fundamentally biased
which would make the data biased and therefore nonrandom.
For example, Thanos presumably saved himself from the snap
(fingers snapping) so he could enjoy his victory.
That would make the data biased.
The other problem with RNGs is that they do fail
and when they fail, they do so silently.
If I was to ask you to look at a string of numbers,
would you be able to tell where they started
and stopped being random?
Probably not.
We can't do that just with our own human brains,
so we use computer brains to do that.
We run statistical checks and balances against our RNGs
to make sure they are still statistically random.
Unless the Infinity Gauntlet was perfect,
it would also have to do this
or else it's apparently totally fair randomness
would just appear random.
The biggest potential problem for our idea though
would be the time it would take the Infinity Gauntlet
to spit out all those random ones and zeros.
If I were to flip a coin to decide the fates
of just everyone on this planet based on my flip rate,
it would take me about 450 years.
Thankfully, our best TRNGs are a lot faster than that.
That random number generator from QuintessenceLabs
that we looked at earlier
could generate the same amount of information
that I would have to in just seven seconds.
Thanos, on his other hand would have
to have everything happen a lot quicker than even this.
He would need to generate all these numbers
with the gauntlet, assign those numbers
and then dust all of the candidates for the snap
in the time it takes to (fingers snapping) snap.
Now, is it reasonable to think that the Infinity Gauntlet
with complete control over time and space
could act as a random number generator
that is much faster than our best technology?
I think that is very reasonable.
I just wanna know what happened to all the plants
and the algae and what about them shrooms?
So how does the Infinity Gauntlet really decide your fate?
Well our suggestion is that among other things,
the glove is an insanely powerful random number generator
that uses the Mind Stone to generate
the fateful sequence of numbers and then the Power Stone
to dust half of all the candidates in the universe.
If it was unbiased and unburdened by problems
then it would be as close as cosmically possible
to a fair and balanced decider
of the fate of half of everything.
Of course, the ending of the Infinity War
will not be random.
There are storylines and comic books
and a whole lot of money to consider
but regardless of how everything ends,
it's gonna be something that you definitely have to see
because science.
'Cause like split in two.
Whoo!
(electronic music)
There is a cool way the Infinity Gauntlet
can get around the time and space problem.
If you wanted the snap to happen
across all the different galaxies in the universe
and more or less the same time.
Everyone could be entangled
quantum mechanically speaking with the gauntlet
and if you were a quantum mechanical system
which you are at the smallest level
then let's say you had a zero and one assigned to you
but it was in a a super position.
So, the zeros and ones exist simultaneously
and only when the (fingers snapping) snap happens
does your wave function collapse
on whether or not you're destined or not.
You either become a zero or one and then you're totally
it happens everywhere.
Also hey if Thanos is traveling across all the stars
to get a random generator,
wouldn't that make it a Star Trek TRNG?
(laughs)
Thank you so much for watching Tommy.
If you want more of me and Because Science,
please follow us here on these social media handles
where you can suggest ideas for future episodes.
Also, the fifth, almost the final episode
of the science of Mortal Kombat is now live.
You're gonna wanna check it out
because we uppercut a guy really hard.
Snap us, snap it.
We snapped it.
We're snapping. (fingers snapping)
(electronic music)