In 1955, RAND Corporation Published a book called A Million Random Digits with a 100,000 Normal Deviates. You can still buy this book on Amazon. In fact, the reviews are hilarious. I came across this gem reading George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral. Dyson's book was a historical exploration of the origins of the (Von Neumann) electronic computer and its one of my favorite books. The late 30's and early 40's were a fascinating time in American history and the development of the first computers were right at the intersection of many things that shaped who we are as a society today. The computer, essentially, was developed out of need for making bomb calculations. Scientists needed to understand the behavior of an unfathomable amount of (vector math/statistics) electrons as they were squeezed and squashed and slammed into one another.
In the 1940s, Stanis Ulam invented a methodology of problem solving called the Monte Carlo Method. In short, he realized that large, infinitely complex problems such as electron behavior or even search algorithms today, are more efficient when seeded with random numbers or when they use some stochastic process. This was an incredible breakthrough, and therefore created a vast need for a large source of truly random numbers.
RAND generated these numbers through the creation of an 'electronic roulette wheel'. While the specifics of the hardware are obscure, essentially it worked by creating noise through a series of random pulses, about 100,000 per second, which were then gated once per second by a constant frequency pulse. In 2009, Thomas Daniel Jennings, MFA candidate from UC Irvine did his own artistic exploration involving RAND's book in his thesis entitled Rocks and Code. As part of his artistic inquiry, he created his own random number generator in which the source of randomness was defined by the radioactive decay of atomic elements. A lovely choice in that it reflects back to the original cultural landscape of the late 40s early 50s and the beginning of the Cold War.
Reading his thesis, I was delighted to find that his advisors were Robert Nideffer and Beatriz Da Costa, whom I've come to know intimately in the last couple of years. That is a whole other story, one which I've outlined in an article for Art21. In some ways, the discovery of this connection illustrated the paradox of randomness and the colloquial phrase: 'that's so random!'. Jennings was interested in the idea of randomness as a limit to human knowledge and subsequently Truth. Anna Deveare-Smith once said "Find the threads of meaning". This to me, is the project of the human, sorting through the noise, creating narrative by weaving together the threads of meaning. The moment I found Jenning's paper was incredibility and understandably important.
With the advent of psuedorandom algorithms, number tables fell out of fashion. Random numbers generated by software aren't truly random. Their generation, in some way or another, follow a deterministic process. Truly random numbers can only be generated by some unpredictable and chaotic process such as atomic decay or cosmic background radiation. This distinctions presents an interesting philosophical question in which I'm trying to wrap my brain around.
Screenshot of the app running
Screenshot of the final output and timestamp
As a first step toward this, I created a program in Processing that used the native Random() function to generate the pseudorandom numbers. I assume that Processing's function relies on Java's Random Class, which is based on the sturdy old linear congruential generator algorithm. The program took 4:34:43 to generate the million pseudorandom digits. The digits are saved into a .txt file that is 6MB. The code is located at this github repository.
From the moment I read about RAND's book, I knew I wanted to use Processing to recreate this monumental object. I'm curious, what does it mean when a non specialist like myself can create with open source tools, what it took a body of experts something close to 8 years to create? What does that say about our species' progression of knowledge and technology and how do those 'advancements' construct and inform who we are today? In short, a recreation in some way is an attempt to use the past as a lens for today.
Knowing of course that these numbers aren't truly random, I intend to create a true random number generator using an Arduino based system. Once the numbers have been generated into a .txt file, I can use Processing to put the numbers into a book format. I know the final output will be a physical object, but there are still many decisions to be made and many things to be thought through.