This video was made possible by Skillshare. Start learning new skills with a free trial
by being one of the first 1,000 to join at the link in the description. 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 thinking that you want to get a little nerdier
and learn a new skill you should check out Skillshare, the online learning community
where millions of creatives can learn more about their passions and interests. There are plenty of great ones that teach
you how to become a great YouTuber, for example, like Polymatter’s class on how to Make Animated
YouTube Videos or Susan Orlean’s on Creative Nonfiction. Often the toughest bit of growing a YouTube
channel is all the learning you have to do at the start, but these courses and others
give you a great head-start and, if you want to learn something different, they also have
fantastic classes on Illustration, or photography, or design, or writing, or filmmaking, or so
much more. You can get a free trial for Skillshare when
you’re one of the first 1,000 to sign up at the link in the description.
The hardcover version on Amazon is $444 -- but free shipping!
Illuminati
Wow this book seems so useless for how expensive it is!
Half of my college textbooks: are you challenging me?