Regruntled.com

Another Tile lattice experiment.  The basic tile is used in all 8 orientations (rotated and/or mirrored) in 12 rows of 8 columns.  The rotations are generated randomly, and then selected programmatically to remove certain combinations of tiles.  Finally I select visually using criteria that I don’t understand well enough to program.

I made a special edge tile and a special corner tile, and rotated them 4 ways to provide a border.  After I did this, I realized that it solves a visual problem: tiling schemes are designed to repeat indefinitely, but in the end one has to generate a finite image, leading to an abrupt termination.  Here the border tiles contain the chaos.

I think this would make a great carpet.

Here are three versions of my Random plain weave.  In the top panel, I select randomly from four colors (most random).  In the middle panel, I allow the randomizer to select the same color twice in a row, but not three times (less random).  In the bottom panel, I don’t let the colors repeat at all (least random).

The mathematical notion of randomness is not a very good approximation for the human sense of randomness.  For example, when Iranians made up the numbers for their bogus election, they didn’t do a very good job of it.  It’s easy enough to tell the difference between random numbers and numbers that somebody made up to look random.

I like some randomness in my images.  There is always the “found art” of patterns that I didn’t explicitly put there.  The easiest thing to do is to use the random number generator built into the programming language (top panel), but the mismatch between math and human psychology suggests that a modified randomness might be more esthetically pleasing.  One can only experiment and see what happens.  In this case, I like the middle panel best.

This image is a mixture of randomness and regularity. There is are two similar patterns repeated on a square grid; but in each cell of the grid, the choice of pattern is determined by a coin toss. The patterns are busy enough and similar enough that the result looks almost-but-not-quite regular.

And yet, there is something else going on. If one stands back far enough from the screen, another pattern emerges, a diagonal maze:

Here is a guy who runs a games-by-email service and needs random numbers.  Lots of them.  So he built an automatic dice roller that rolls dice, runs them past a video camera, and reads the results.  1.3 million rolls a day.

Generating random numbers is a hard problem, and there are some philosophical issues (determinism, etc.) as to whether a series of numbers is “truly random”.  On the other hand, all sorts of information is available, and there are even hardware gadgets that you can plug into a PC that will generate random numbers from things like thermal noise in resistors.  There are open source statistical programs that will test your data for randomness.

My view is that “random is as random does”.  If the data passes the statistical tests for randomness, it’s random, even if it “really” came from a deterministic  source.  If the data doesn’t pass the statistical tests, it’s not random, even if it came from a “truly random” quantum source.

Mr. Dice-O-Matic seems to be blissfully unaware of the state of the art.  He’s put all his effort into building his contraption and none (as far as I can tell) into testing the output.  How random are his dice rolls?  No one knows, because he didn’t test them.  His policy:

There is no doubt that I will still receive complaints about the rolls, but now I can honestly say I have done all that I can possibly do: the rolls you get are exactly as random as those you would get throwing by hand. As I promised earlier, if you donate to the site and are unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice.

Here’s another experiment, for no particular reason.  The box below displays random paragraphs from Secret Ballet:

You can reload the page to get a new fragment.  I seem to be pushing the limits of Blogger.  When I do something like this, some things will work, and some things won’t.  I can publish this post, but I can’t edit it on Blogger, I have to delete it, edit it on my computer, and repost it.

For some reason I find Secret Ballet fascinating.  I keep wanting to read just a little bit more, even though I know the book was assembled from sample sentences in  a dictionary.  There’s nothing really there.

Is television news any different?  News is a business.  The stories are composed, packaged, teased and delivered by professional news readers.  There is a pretense of substance, the idea that something important actually happened, but on a slow news day, the news business fills the same amount of air time with no substance at all.

Maybe the fascination is that Secret Ballet doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is.

There are 138,510 versions of this page. The background is randomized, as is the image to the right. Although Blogger, the platform, hosts zillions of people spewing mindless drivel, randomizing the images was surprisingly hard to do. I had to put the randomness on a different server and link to it.

Can I randomize the text of a blog post? Again, this is easy enough on another server, but not so easy on Blogger. But maybe there is a way.

In the literary world, the cut-up technique can be traced back to the Surrealists, but is mostly associated with Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in the 50s. The name comes from cutting up newspapers with razor blades and physically juxtaposing pieces of paper.

The Dice Man, by Luke Rhinehart, is a novel about randomness. The protagonist makes life decisions by rolling dice. On the other hand, Secret Ballet, by Detlev Fischer, is a randomized novel. It is composed of example sentences from a dictionary, arranged with some assistance from the author. The resulting text is quite readable, and the effect is more aimlessness than randomness.