What is randomness? The way people describe it will always be different from one another. Yet it boils down to the same general boiler phrase, “it is unpredictable.” We say it is, but at the same time, randomness can be predicted over a large sample. We say random often in day-to-day life, intentionally or unintentionally, like “oh! this randomly happened today!” or “I just thought to do this today randomly!” It never really is random, is it? There is always something behind an event. This brings me to something Casey Reas said, and that is true randomness. He mentions it multiple times, saying that it has been used. However, at most, it is pseudo-random, and we can delve deeper into this and discuss causation and so on, but that is not my point here. I am aware that I might be nitpicking here; however, to me, “random” implies a lack of a proper explanation relative to a model or an event. Or to simplify it, it’s lawful unpredictability.
For my second assignment, my sketch was a 3D version of Conway’s Game of Life. Which, funnily enough, is how cells interact when they are given a certain set of rules. I created this before watching the lecture, so while I was watching it, I kept thinking about the sketch. The result of running such a sketch may seem random to some person you choose off the street, but at a deep level, they are following a set of rules that the person may not know. And that is what randomness to me is, a “random” event or randomness is never truly random, as it will always follow a set rule; we call it random because we do not know what that rule is. The lecture made me realize that I was already treating randomness as epistemic, but I hadn’t articulated it this clearly until seeing generative systems framed this way.