Randomness

phunehehe

This is dedicated to Nhat, who I think will have some interest in this subject (although I wonder if he would ever come to read this). However, it is open to everyone… Some of you may think that this has no meaning, if this is the case, just ignore this essay.

In life, things happens so quick and so complicated that we all think of some kind of “chance” or “random” that affects the whole world. Recently I have done a research about this matter and I have some interesting findings.

Please do not think that I am so free that I have nothing to do but to wander around the internet. I did the research as a part of my assignment, in which I have to find a way to generate random numbers.

At first my thought was very simple: “The program itself must have a function to create random numbers, let’s find it and I am done with this assignment!”. However my program is a simulator of a computer CPU, and it is so simple that it has no such function. “OK I’ll make my own!”, but things were not that easy.

In a computer (or in fact, any kind of machines), there are no randomness. You can imagine how angry I was when I finally came to this conclusion. “How would I complete my program without a random number?”. The thoughts brought me back to Nhat’s words about “Determinism” (the idea that says "everything is destined to happen"). In the world of IT, that is exactly correct.

After an exhaustive through many websites, I finally found some solutions (which is a little bit too complicated to show here). The important fact is the meaning of this to me: nothing is really random. Everything is connected, in one way or another.

I am so excited about this that I am posting this here so that those interested can see it. I think you have exciting things happening in your schools too, why don’t you say it aloud?