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Unrandom Thought
Mar. 30th, 2006 04:46 pmI have to input a lot of numbers into a database at work; they're bid prices, and I assume were arrived at by the construction companies' toting up of material and labour costs, plus whatever percentage they tack on as their profit. Some appear to have been rounded up to the nearest hundred, others not. Thing is, I keep seeing palindromes and repeating three-digit combinations and stuff in them, and I have to remind myself that these aren't part of some deliberate pattern being created by the contractors for reasons of their own.
This started me thinking about my favourite part of Robert Charles Wilson's Chronoliths, a (probably) throwaway paragraph in which the narrator mentions he's studying the difference between real and perceived randomness - ask people to pick "random" numbers, and they will usually instead come up with unobtrusive numbers, ones that don't set off the human tendency to spot patterns, but which are for that reason anything but random.
I'd like to have seen the idea developed more in the novel; although it did bear a thematic relationship to the rest of the story, (coincidence/pattern etc), Wilson never really went anywhere (that I noticed) with that specific angle.
This started me thinking about my favourite part of Robert Charles Wilson's Chronoliths, a (probably) throwaway paragraph in which the narrator mentions he's studying the difference between real and perceived randomness - ask people to pick "random" numbers, and they will usually instead come up with unobtrusive numbers, ones that don't set off the human tendency to spot patterns, but which are for that reason anything but random.
I'd like to have seen the idea developed more in the novel; although it did bear a thematic relationship to the rest of the story, (coincidence/pattern etc), Wilson never really went anywhere (that I noticed) with that specific angle.
