6 ms·

Randomness: the Ghost in the Machine? (2014)

56 points by probe 9y ago

everdev 9y ago
I'm not familiar with the inner workings of random number generators but is true randomness even possible or is the randomness just so complex that we can't reverse engineer it? My instinct says that if you run the same random number generator in the same hardware with the same Unix timestamp and same inputs wouldn't the outputs be the same?
- Armisael16 9y ago
  Yes, true randomness is possible through quantum phenomenon. No, it isn’t possible to generate true randomness using deterministic processes (eg, almost all computational ones).
  - intralizee 9y ago
    Determinists would ask, is the quantum phenomenon just ignorance by current lack of understanding to what humans can possibly know with the tools we have now? True randomness is like believing in god if your life is good or praying to a god if your life is bad.
    - selestify 9y ago
      According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are no local hidden variables and the world is truly random. Even knowing the complete state of a particle will not tell you how its wave function will collapse.
      - intralizee 9y ago
        I am convinced God does not play dice.
- dahart 9y ago
  If your random number generator is pure software, it’s repeatable. People sell hardware random number generators that are based on Geiger counters, since radiation is (as far as we know) truly random.
  - martinpw 9y ago
    I believe some (all?) new Intel processors have built-in hardware components which are a source of truly random numbers.
    - dahart 9y ago
      I just read about it, and it looks like a very strong and fast RNG. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels-new-randomnumber-generator https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels-n... But, fwiw, this isn’t “truly” random in the quantum sense. It’s only difficult to predict as far as anyone knows, but is still built on deterministic processes. Radiation, on the other hand, is (as far as anyone knows) physically “truly” non-deterministic.
- RpFLCL 9y ago
  A similar thought experiment: If you could somehow pause the universe, create an exact duplicate, then press "play" on both at the same time, would they remain in sync? Would their futures be the same? If so, it implies that any randomness we think exists is actually deterministic but too difficult for us to currently understand. If they diverge then randomness or free will do exist. But this doesn't explain what mechanism makes it possible.
  - everdev 9y ago
    Right. I suppose that would reveal if quantum fluctuations are truly random.
dahart 9y ago
> you are not your body, you are not your brain, you are not your genome, you are not your connectome, you are not what you eat, you are not your social network, you are not your taste in music, you are not your history This totally reminded me of the Chuck Palahniuk quote from Fight Club: “You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” This article covered a lot of ground, I quite enjoyed it. It made me think there’s a big irony, or maybe it’s a paradox. We need the existence of true randomness in physics in order to allow for free will. And yet willfulness is the exact opposite of randomness.
- kuroguro 9y ago
  I never really understood why randomness would be needed for free will. If that's the only thing keeping the will "free" would it even matter if our decisions are made deterministically or by a dice roll? Guess I have some reading to do.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    I think the point is that if there's no randomness, people's actions must be completely predictable, and if they're predictable it's impossible for people to do other than what's been predicted and so there's no free will. On the other hand, having randomness opens up the possibility to act in ways that are not completely predictable and that's where the potential for freedom of the will comes in. But randomness alone isn't enough for free will, for the reason you allude to (that one might be "forced" to follow some sort of cosmic "dice roll", as unpredictable as it might be). It just seems to be one pre-requisite, in a certain way of viewing the problem.
    - syrrim 9y ago
      But the universe is turing complete, so the only way to predict what will happen is to run a perfect simulation of everything in the universe. This is clearly impossible within the universe, and so your actions remain unpredictable.
placebo 9y ago
Interesting how the concept of randomness can only exist in contrast to the recognition of order, but who notices order other than a mind that defines it as such? But this mind could not have been created in the first place were it not for some intrinsic order, some consistency in reality. Makes my head spin...
- visarga 9y ago
  > But this mind could not have been created in the first place were it not for some intrinsic order The mind was created by self replication and competition over multiple generations (evolution). Self replication requires ability to adapt to environment, to collect energy and materials, to protect from predators. This was the playground where minds evolved. We're using similar techniques in AlphaGo, for example, where a sequence of players are pitted against each other. Randomness is essential for exploration, which is a step without which we couldn't be intelligent. In reinforcement learning, the so called epsilon-greedy strategy of exploration says to select a random action with probability epsilon. It is a simple strategy that leads to intelligence. Of course, humans have smarter exploration strategies which nonetheless rely on randomness.
visarga 9y ago
Just want to add that biological neurons are stochastic and that artificial neural nets rely on noise injection, random connection dropout, random initialisation and random mini-batch reshuffling to work well. GANs start from a random number in generating images or other types of data. Alternative optimisation strategies to gradient descent - such as evolutionary strategies, use randomness in combining genes for the next generation of agents. Without randomness we would have no intelligent artificial agents. It's like intelligence can only happen at the demarcation line between chaos and order.
- thomasahle 9y ago
  > Without randomness we would have no intelligent artificial agents. It's like intelligence can only happen at the demarcation line between chaos and order. I doubt most NN's are trained using true randomness. Most likely a fairly simple deterministic generator works just fine.
laretluval 9y ago
In a maximally efficient interactive system, user input appears as random noise. This is because such a system will contain a model of the distribution of its input in order to be able to predict it and react as soon as possible. The system only needs to react to the component of input which it was not able to predict using this model. Thus if there is an intelligent entity manipulating our universe, and if our universe is efficient in this sense, then the outside entity's input will appear as perfectly random maximum entropy noise when viewed from within the system.
air7 9y ago
"Free Will" as a concept just makes no sense. I think it's obvious that any system can be conceptually described as a function of all-inputs-that-affect-it, plus randomness. No room for free will. The only thing free will has going for it is the unmistakable, unshakeable feeling that I really have it.
- Viliam1234 9y ago
  And that feeling probably just means: "I can't reliably predict myself." Which is more about one's ability to predict, than about some intrinsic unpredictability.

56 points by probe 9y ago

I'm not familiar with the inner workings of random number generators but is true randomness even possible or is the randomness just so complex that we can't reverse engineer it? My instinct says that if you run the same random number generator in the same hardware with the same Unix timestamp and same inputs wouldn't the outputs be the same?

Armisael16 9y ago
Yes, true randomness is possible through quantum phenomenon. No, it isn’t possible to generate true randomness using deterministic processes (eg, almost all computational ones).
- intralizee 9y ago
  Determinists would ask, is the quantum phenomenon just ignorance by current lack of understanding to what humans can possibly know with the tools we have now? True randomness is like believing in god if your life is good or praying to a god if your life is bad.
  - selestify 9y ago
    According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are no local hidden variables and the world is truly random. Even knowing the complete state of a particle will not tell you how its wave function will collapse.
    - intralizee 9y ago
      I am convinced God does not play dice.
dahart 9y ago
If your random number generator is pure software, it’s repeatable. People sell hardware random number generators that are based on Geiger counters, since radiation is (as far as we know) truly random.
- martinpw 9y ago
  I believe some (all?) new Intel processors have built-in hardware components which are a source of truly random numbers.
  - dahart 9y ago
    I just read about it, and it looks like a very strong and fast RNG. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels-new-randomnumber-generator https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels-n... But, fwiw, this isn’t “truly” random in the quantum sense. It’s only difficult to predict as far as anyone knows, but is still built on deterministic processes. Radiation, on the other hand, is (as far as anyone knows) physically “truly” non-deterministic.
RpFLCL 9y ago
A similar thought experiment: If you could somehow pause the universe, create an exact duplicate, then press "play" on both at the same time, would they remain in sync? Would their futures be the same? If so, it implies that any randomness we think exists is actually deterministic but too difficult for us to currently understand. If they diverge then randomness or free will do exist. But this doesn't explain what mechanism makes it possible.
- everdev 9y ago
  Right. I suppose that would reveal if quantum fluctuations are truly random.

dahart 9y ago

> you are not your body, you are not your brain, you are not your genome, you are not your connectome, you are not what you eat, you are not your social network, you are not your taste in music, you are not your history This totally reminded me of the Chuck Palahniuk quote from Fight Club: “You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” This article covered a lot of ground, I quite enjoyed it. It made me think there’s a big irony, or maybe it’s a paradox. We need the existence of true randomness in physics in order to allow for free will. And yet willfulness is the exact opposite of randomness.

kuroguro 9y ago
I never really understood why randomness would be needed for free will. If that's the only thing keeping the will "free" would it even matter if our decisions are made deterministically or by a dice roll? Guess I have some reading to do.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  I think the point is that if there's no randomness, people's actions must be completely predictable, and if they're predictable it's impossible for people to do other than what's been predicted and so there's no free will. On the other hand, having randomness opens up the possibility to act in ways that are not completely predictable and that's where the potential for freedom of the will comes in. But randomness alone isn't enough for free will, for the reason you allude to (that one might be "forced" to follow some sort of cosmic "dice roll", as unpredictable as it might be). It just seems to be one pre-requisite, in a certain way of viewing the problem.
  - syrrim 9y ago
    But the universe is turing complete, so the only way to predict what will happen is to run a perfect simulation of everything in the universe. This is clearly impossible within the universe, and so your actions remain unpredictable.

placebo 9y ago

Interesting how the concept of randomness can only exist in contrast to the recognition of order, but who notices order other than a mind that defines it as such? But this mind could not have been created in the first place were it not for some intrinsic order, some consistency in reality. Makes my head spin...

visarga 9y ago
> But this mind could not have been created in the first place were it not for some intrinsic order The mind was created by self replication and competition over multiple generations (evolution). Self replication requires ability to adapt to environment, to collect energy and materials, to protect from predators. This was the playground where minds evolved. We're using similar techniques in AlphaGo, for example, where a sequence of players are pitted against each other. Randomness is essential for exploration, which is a step without which we couldn't be intelligent. In reinforcement learning, the so called epsilon-greedy strategy of exploration says to select a random action with probability epsilon. It is a simple strategy that leads to intelligence. Of course, humans have smarter exploration strategies which nonetheless rely on randomness.

visarga 9y ago

Just want to add that biological neurons are stochastic and that artificial neural nets rely on noise injection, random connection dropout, random initialisation and random mini-batch reshuffling to work well. GANs start from a random number in generating images or other types of data. Alternative optimisation strategies to gradient descent - such as evolutionary strategies, use randomness in combining genes for the next generation of agents. Without randomness we would have no intelligent artificial agents. It's like intelligence can only happen at the demarcation line between chaos and order.

thomasahle 9y ago
> Without randomness we would have no intelligent artificial agents. It's like intelligence can only happen at the demarcation line between chaos and order. I doubt most NN's are trained using true randomness. Most likely a fairly simple deterministic generator works just fine.

laretluval 9y ago

In a maximally efficient interactive system, user input appears as random noise. This is because such a system will contain a model of the distribution of its input in order to be able to predict it and react as soon as possible. The system only needs to react to the component of input which it was not able to predict using this model. Thus if there is an intelligent entity manipulating our universe, and if our universe is efficient in this sense, then the outside entity's input will appear as perfectly random maximum entropy noise when viewed from within the system.

air7 9y ago

"Free Will" as a concept just makes no sense. I think it's obvious that any system can be conceptually described as a function of all-inputs-that-affect-it, plus randomness. No room for free will. The only thing free will has going for it is the unmistakable, unshakeable feeling that I really have it.

Viliam1234 9y ago
And that feeling probably just means: "I can't reliably predict myself." Which is more about one's ability to predict, than about some intrinsic unpredictability.