draft - 09 January 2024 - James Wiles

Stephen Wolfram’s realization that simple rules can create complex patterns was an important scientific discovery, but just how important this was has only dawned on me recently. I was also impressed with what I read in A New Kind of Science, but it always felt just shy of explaining a problem I have been enamored with since high school.

What is the source of true randomness?

Picture a young James sitting in a computer class [insert story of how no one else was there] learning how to program things into a computer (which felt like a ideal world, because now he didn't need to deal with humans if everything could be computed). Everything was making perfect sense, and a feeling of perfect calm fell over him as he diligently learnt how to construct his own universe where everything could be perfectly coded and devoid of logical inconsistencies.

Unfortunately, one fateful day James learnt about how to generate a random number on a computer. Mr Techman: “type in random(), and it returns a random number… well not really random, pseudo-random”. So being the insatiably curious human I am, I ask: “Cool, but how to generate a real random number?” To my shock and horror he replies “It is not possible.”

What? How could this be? Are you saying my personal perfect computer universe could never encapsulate the full human experience? How would I be able to create the applications that relied on true randomness? (List of games with randomness I could play by myself). “Don't worry, the numbers are VERY almost-random.” Mr Techman tries to consume me, but that is not good enough for me.

I was obsessed about how to solve this. For the next 20 years I thought about this almost every day. I read about increasingly imaginative ways to generate better quality randomness. I thought that the highest quality of randomness was the best we could do, and some of the best came from quantum effects and cosmic background radiation, apparently.

After playing game of life obsessively for a year, I realised it was turning complete and could technically recreate all computation and simulate some aspects of life, but it would never replicate life completely because real life has true randomness and this was not possible inside of a computer program. So when a read about Stephen Wolfram's work and Rule 30 I was intrigued but it was still a computer program and could only create pseudo-randomness with its iterative irreducible computation. If you know all the rules, then you can create the exact same result no matter how many times you run it. True randomness should be totally unpredictable, never pre-computable, and always different, I thought, because this is how we experience it in daily life.

(Munger quote about always inverting)

Now the Wolfram Physics Project has thrown the whole concept upside down. What if we are inside the computer, and our source of randomness IS actually just simple rules that are iteratively giving us unknowable results due to our bounded limitations. If we are programs running inside of a computational universe, then to us the pseudo-randomness IS true randomness from our perspective.

This has closed a 20 year old question for me, that scope and scale (share story of physics class ignoring my scale idea) are fundamentally important and are intrinsically linked to the perspective of the observer and how the observer is defined. I feel like I can finally proceed with my childhood dream of being a better version of Star Trek’s Spock and that effective reason by pure logic is possible. Despite my acceptance that dealing with the messiness of everyday life was necessary, somewhere inside me there is still a little boy who thinks it's possible to create a universe we can understand.

I realized that Stephen Wolfram’s idea of computationally irreducible systems being able to create true randomness is potentially the most important discovery in all of science, because it feels like it could explain ALL of science; at least to me it has given me a framework with which to reason about everything, and allowed me to move on to new fundamental questions, not hindered anymore by source of chaos.

The meaning of life is at least connected to the search for meaning, and for the first time since that day in the computer room, I am in a place to start expanding my search.