While looking for a name for the cocktail I've been drinking this week and this evening, (apparently called Rory O'More, but without bitters because I don't have any), I discovered the Cocktail database, a sure-to-be-useful reference tool, and this lovely essay, on a subject near and dear to my heart - randomness. I've written at length on the subject of random and pseudo-random events, but am currently too snockered to find my previously blathering, so instead, read the following eloquent essay, which begins...
Mixilator Advanced Notes : People spend their lives obsessed with probabilities. Why shouldn’t they? To conquer probability by finding a way to predict it is a window into the future. Perhaps that’s why the idea of randomness has always been so fascinating. That which is random cannot be predicted. It is ultimately elusive and it is human nature to want, or be smitten with, that which cannot be grasped; that which cannot be held. We constantly try and find ways to beat it.Digging into a hat full of paper scraps is our cultural vision of randomness… that, and lightning. The latter is naturally random, the former applied randomness. We excel at channeling the inscrutable nature of the random act into an energy we can harness. We make games from it. We invent dice and roll them. We invent cards and shuffle them. We draw tiny scraps of paper from the soft felt depths of a hat.
Random generations –strings of things put together without thought or weight- are another sort of game. The old game of Mad Libs installs a random word –corresponding to a part of speech- into a prewritten narrative to humorous effect. The word is random because the person generating the word does not know the context of the narrative into which it will be installed. Most random generators on the Web (and there are many) have a basis not unlike Mad Libs, which are now themselves on the Internet. It all feeds our fascination with the serendipity of randomness that suddenly, inexplicably, makes sense. The theoretical chestnut that monkeys typing randomly on typewriters – if given enough time, would reproduce the works of William Shakespeare is fulfilled. In point of fact, there is a website with a virtual contest derived from that theory, complete with virtual monkeys.
Actually, because of how they operate, computers have a tough time being random. A specific instruction fetches a specific response every time. If not, it's considered an error. All random generators on computers –and therefore on the internet- have at their base a random number generator. Insofar as the core language of all computers is binary (ones and zeros) it is evident numbers would be the building blocks not only of predictable results, but of entertaining random processes as well. A random number ends up equaling a random ingredient in a random generation.
Ted Haigh continues on, but then veers into David Embury and theories about proper mixology leading to creation of the 'perfect drink randomizer', aka the Mixilator. Unfortunately, the first several 'random' drinks I mixed up all include ingredients I don't have, and most included ingredients I've never even heard of.
Oh well. Pour me another Rory O'More, will ya? I'm headed out the door in 30 minutes, and I can still see the seams in my shirt.
