The enigmatic moniker, ‘Seemingly Random Musings,’ bears the weight of a tale spun some three decades ago. Picture a young scholar navigating the labyrinthine corridors of academia, ensnared in the intricacies of an undergraduate thesis. The subject du jour? The mystical art of Markov Chains and their application in optimizing the intricate ballet of task assignments for the nascent realm of computer parallel processing.
Crafting a computer model was par for the course, and a humble yet pivotal component of this mechanical symphony was a random number generator. An affair seemingly straightforward, as our protagonist turned to the BASIC programming language’s ‘random’ function to conjure the requisite numerical caprice.
But the fates, it seems, had more nuanced plans. The hour of reckoning arrived in the form of a viva-voce examination, where the sagacious Professor and the venerable Head of the computer science department cast a discerning eye. Their observation? A disconcerting perception of determinism in the model’s results.
Here begins the philosophical labyrinth of a beleaguered scholar’s inner turmoil. For a quarter of an hour, he traversed the labyrinth of his thoughts, beads of perspiration forming, and the specter of academic ignominy beckoning. And then, as is often the case in academic dramas, a revelation—a thunderclap of insight.
The computer, it dawned upon him, was not a harbinger of true randomness. No, it birthed ‘pseudo-random’ numbers, a sequence destined to wrap itself in the folds of repetition after a given interval. The scholar’s day was rescued from the abyss, and in that moment of salvation, a profound verity unfurled like a tapestry—nothing, perhaps, in the vast cosmos is genuinely random, but it cloaks itself in the garments of seeming randomness.
Hence, dear reader, the title ‘Seemingly Random Musings,’ as a testament to the imperceptible order veiled behind the façade of capricious chaos.