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)
